Unemployment and Well-Being of Europeans Across the Life Cycle: The Role of Countries’ Macroeconomic Situation

Gintarė Mališauskaite, Olena Nizalova and Despoina Xanthopoulou
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Despoina Xanthopoulou: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2022, vol. 162, issue 3, No 17, 1387-1412

Abstract: Abstract Unemployment impairs individuals’ well-being and health and there is some empirical evidence showing that macroeconomic conditions can moderate these effects. This paper goes a step further and investigates differences in how macroeconomic indicators of European countries’ economic situation relate to individual subjective health and well-being, and also moderate the relationship between individual labour market exclusion and these outcomes across age groups: young individuals (aged 15–29), prime working age adults (aged 30–49, base category) and pre-retirement age adults (aged 50–64). We used two different macroeconomic indicators to define macroeconomic situation: country-level unemployment rate and gross domestic product (GDP). Both indicators were disaggregated into long-term economic trend and business cycle shocks using Hodrick–Prescott filtering to allow distinguishing between expected and unexpected change in macroeconomic circumstances. We used the European Social Survey individual-level data from 35 European countries for 2002–2014. Multi-level analysis with three levels were run for men and women separately. Results revealed differences in how individual-level unemployment related to well-being depending on the age group, with pre-retirement age group adults’ health and well-being suffering the most. Also, macroeconomic indicators were found to moderate the relationship between individual-level unemployment and subjective health and well-being with some noticeable differences between age groups, and with GDP trend having the most sizeable influence.

Keywords: European age cohort analysis; Macroeconomic conditions; Subjective health and well-being; Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-022-02892-y

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