Scarring or Scaring? The Psychological Impact of Past Unemployment and Future Unemployment Risk

Andreas Knabe and Steffen Rätzel

No 8013, FEMM Working Papers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management

Abstract: We reassess the “scarring” hypothesis by Clark et al. (2001) which states that unemployment experienced in the past reduces a person’s current life satisfaction even after the person has become reemployed. Our results suggest that it is not the scar from past unemployment but the expectation to become unemployed in the future that makes people unhappy. Hence, the terminology should be changed by one letter: unemployment is not “scarring”, but “scaring”.

Keywords: unemployment; scarring; happiness; life satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J28 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2008-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de/fwwdeka/femm/a2008_Dateien/2008_13.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Journal Article: Scarring or Scaring? The Psychological Impact of Past Unemployment and Future Unemployment Risk (2011)
Working Paper: Scarring or Scaring? The Psychological Impact of Past Unemployment and Future Unemployment Risk (2008)
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:mag:wpaper:08013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEMM Working Papers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Guido Henkel ().