Better an insecure job than no job at all? Unemployment, job insecurity and subjective wellbeing

Andreas Knabe and Steffen Rätzel

Economics Bulletin, 2010, vol. 30, issue 3, 2486-2494

Abstract: We analyze the impact of a person’s current employment status and expectations about his or her future labor market status on life satisfaction, using long -run panel data for Germany. Our findings suggest that future expectations (measured by perceived job security for the employed and chances to find a new job for the unemployed) are at least as important for a person ’s subjective well-being as his or her current employment status. This implies that an unemployed person who thinks it will be easy to find a new job might be happier than if he had an insecure job. There might be circum¬stances under which having no job is less harmful for subjective well-being than being employed in an insecure one.

Keywords: Financial; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C5 G0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09-23
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

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