Regional Unemployment and Norm-Induced Effects on Life Satisfaction

Adrian Chadi

No 201306, IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU)

Abstract: While rising unemployment generally reduces people’s happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study rejects this thesis for German panel data, however, and finds that individual unemployment is even more hurtful when regional unemployment is higher. On the other hand, an extended model that separately considers individuals who feel stigmatised from living off public funds yields strong evidence that this group of people does in fact suffer less when the normative pressure to earn one’s own living is lower. A comprehensive discussion reconciles these findings with the existing research and concludes that in order to find evidence for the often-described social-norm effect it is worthwhile to analyse disutility associated with benefit receipts.

Keywords: social norms; regional unemployment; individual unemployment; well-being; social benefits; labour market policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaaeg.de/images/DiscussionPaper/2013_06.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Regional unemployment and norm-induced effects on life satisfaction (2014)
Working Paper: Regional Unemployment and Norm-Induced Effects on Life Satisfaction (2011)
Working Paper: Regional unemployment and norm-induced effects on life satisfaction (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iaa:dpaper:201306

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Chadi ().