IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/shf/wpaper/2009009.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

It’s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological well-being

Author

Listed:
  • Jennifer Roberts

    (Department of Economics, The University of Sheffield Author-Person=pro228)

  • Robert Hodgson
  • Paul Dolan

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Jennifer Roberts & Robert Hodgson & Paul Dolan, 2009. "It’s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological well-being," Working Papers 2009009, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics, revised May 2009.
    • Handle: RePEc:shf:wpaper:2009009
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/09/64/15/SERPS2009.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2009
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. It’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 20:51:17

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ann Verhetsel & Joris Beckers & Michiel Meyere, 2018. "Assessing Daily Urban Systems: A Heterogeneous Commuting Network Approach," Networks and Spatial Economics, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 633-656, September.
    2. Erika Sandow, 2014. "Til Work Do Us Part: The Social Fallacy of Long-distance Commuting," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(3), pages 526-543, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Commuting; Happiness; Well-being;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • R4 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:shf:wpaper:2009009. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mike Crabtree (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desheuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.