Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox

Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey

No 151, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

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: location theory; commuting; compensating variation; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D61 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Stress that Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox* (2008)
Working Paper: Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:iewwpx:151

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