Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox

Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey

No 1278, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses. We discuss several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this ‘commuting paradox’.

Keywords: compensating variation; commuting; location theory; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D61 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2004-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-geo, nep-ltv, nep-mic and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published - published in: Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2007, 110 (2), 339 - 366

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1278.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Stress that Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox* (2008)
Working Paper: Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox
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:iza:izadps:dp1278

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().