It’s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological well-being
Abstract
In this paper, we seek to explore the effects of commuting time on the psychological well-being of men and women in the UK. We use annual data from the British Household Panel Survey in a fixed effects panel framework that includes variables known to determine well-being, as well as factors which may provide compensation for commuting such as income, job satisfaction and housing quality. Our results show that, even after all these variables are considered, commuting still has an important detrimental effect on the well-being of women, but not men, and this result is robust to numerous different specifications. We explore possible explanations for this gender difference and can find no evidence that it is due to women´s shorter working hours or weaker occupational position. Rather women´s greater sensitivity to commuting time seems to be a result of their larger responsibility for day-to-day household tasks, including childcare.Download Info
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Paper provided by The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 2009009.
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Length: 30 pages
Date of creation: May 2009
Date of revision:
May 2009
Handle: RePEc:shf:wpaper:2009009
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For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (David Cuberes).
Related research
Keywords: Commuting; Happiness; Well-being;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
- I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
- R4 - Urban, Rural, Regional and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Systems
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2010-04-17 (All new papers)
- NEP-HAP-2010-04-17 (Economics of Happiness)
- NEP-LAB-2010-04-17 (Labour Economics)
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As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:- Itâ??s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological well-being
by Ariel Goldring in Free Market Mojo on 2010-05-10 15:51:17
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