 Entrepreneurial worries: Self-employment and potential loss of well-beingJournal of Economic Psychology, 2024, vol. 105, issue C Abstract: The relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction has been shown to be heterogeneous in the literature. This paper analyzes a channel through which lower well-being can come about for the self-employed, namely, their worries about their business (“entrepreneurial worries”). Using a two-way fixed effects estimator on German panel data (1984–2020), I find no overall effect of becoming self-employed on life satisfaction, and heterogeneity analysis shows that only those self-employed individuals who change from unemployment to self-employment report higher life satisfaction. Mediation analysis reveals that worries about one’s financial situation (and, to some extent, job security) mediate the relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction. Life satisfaction decreases as self-employed individuals worry more about their financial situation as a result of becoming self-employed. Only if one does not worry about one’s financial situation at all does self-employment contribute positively to life satisfaction. Keywords: Subjective well-being; Self-employment; Worries; SOEP; Life satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:105:y:2024:i:c:s0167487024000813 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2024.102773 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to econpapers@oru.se.
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.