 The Price of Pet Ownership: Reduced Labour Mobility?Robbie Maris and Michael Cameron Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato Abstract: Pets are an important part of many peoples’ lives. Studies of the mental, physical and emotional benefits of pet ownership have been extensively discussed in the literature. However, the costs of pet ownership have received less attention. We investigate whether pet ownership decreases the incomes of pet owners by reducing labour mobility. Answering this question may help people to better understand the full range of costs and benefits of pet ownership, as well as pointing to broader labour market efficiency issues. Using data from the 2018 General Social Survey, we investigate the relationship between income and pet ownership, controlling for a rich set of covariates. We include interactions between pet ownership and education, pet ownership and housing tenure, and pet ownership and race, to further investigate this relationship. Overall, we find initial support for our hypothesis that pet ownership decreases labour mobility, and consequently income. These negative effects are larger for highly educated workers, renters and African Americans. Keywords: pet ownership; labour mobility; Mincer wage regression (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wai:econwp:22/03 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, 3240. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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