We investigate how individual well-being is affected by unemployment. Analyzing German panel data on life-satisfaction, we find that unemployment has a large and negative effect for male individuals. The effect is large enough to increase the probability that a mid-aged male is dissatisfied by more than 10 percentage points. We decompose the total well-being costs of unemployment and find that for males at least two thirds are non-pecuniary while at most one third are pecuniary costs. One implication is that the benefits of employment generating policies exceed the benefits of policies that are designed to mitigate the effects of unemployment through income transfers.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Canterbury, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
9507.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)