The Role of Social Work Norms in Job Searching and Subjective Well-Being

Alois Stutzer and Rafael Lalive

No 300, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Social norms are usually neglected in economics because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to live off one’s own income and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The stronger the norm, the more quickly unemployed people find a new job. This behavior can be explained by utility differences, probably due to social pressure. Unemployed people are significantly less happy than employed people and their reduction in life satisfaction is the larger, the stronger the norm is.

Keywords: duration of unemployment; unemployment; subjective well-being; social norms; Job searching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2001-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published - published in: Journal of the European Economic Association, 2004, 2 (4), 696-719

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp300.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Role of Social Work Norms in Job Searching and Subjective Well-Being (2004)
Working Paper: The Role of Social Work Norms in Job Searching and Subjective Well-Being
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:dp300

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 ().