Comparative well-being of the self-employed and paid employees in the USA

Panka Bencsik and Tuugi Chuluun ()
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Tuugi Chuluun: Loyola University Maryland

Small Business Economics, 2021, vol. 56, issue 1, No 17, 355-384

Abstract: Abstract Drawing upon the job demand-control model and analyzing more than 600,000 responses from the nationally representative Gallup survey data over the 2010–2016 period, we find that self-employed individuals in the USA report lower life satisfaction than paid employees (i.e., evaluative well-being). The self-employed also experience both positive feelings such as happiness and enjoyment and negative feelings such as anger and stress more than their wage-earning peers, leading to a stark emotional dichotomy in how they experience their daily lives (i.e., hedonic well-being) consistent with both high job control and high job demand that are prevalent in self-employment. Lastly, the self-employed also report more health problems and lower physical well-being. Income (and low local unemployment to some extent) successfully mitigates the negative effects of self-employment on subjective well-being while enhancing the positive, but education does not do so. Overall, the results suggest that self-employment is associated with predominantly negative well-being effects in the USA.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Health; Self-employment; Entrepreneurship; Job demand-control model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 I19 I31 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-019-00221-1

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