Time Use, Unemployment, and Well-Being: An Empirical Analysis Using British Time-Use Data
- PDF / 663,755 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 12 Downloads / 174 Views
Time Use, Unemployment, and Well‑Being: An Empirical Analysis Using British Time‑Use Data Thi Truong An Hoang1 · Andreas Knabe1,2,3 Accepted: 1 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We use nationally representative data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014/2015 to investigate how a person’s employment status is related to time use and cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective well-being. We do not find clear indications that employed and unemployed persons experience different average levels of emotional well-being when they engage in the same kinds of activities. For the employed, working belongs to one of the least enjoyable activities of their day. They also spend a large share of their time at work and on work-related activities. The unemployed, instead, spend more time on leisure and more enjoyable activities. When looking at duration-weighted average affective wellbeing over the entire waking time of the day, the unemployed experience, on average, more enjoyment than the employed. For the employed, the more hours they have to work on a specific day, the lower the average enjoyment they experience on that day. Differentiating the analyses by weekdays and weekends supports the finding that being able to freely allocate one’s non-work time is associated with higher levels of affective well-being. In line with previous studies on cognitive well-being, we find that the unemployed report substantially lower levels of life satisfaction than the employed. Keywords Unemployment · Happiness · Affective well-being · Time use · Day reconstruction method JEL Classification I31 · D91 · J60 · J22 The data used in this study are available in the UK Data Archive with the identifier https://doi. org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-8128-1. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1090 2-020-00320-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Andreas Knabe [email protected] Thi Truong An Hoang [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, P.O. Box 4120, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany
2
CESifo, Munich, Germany
3
IWH, Halle, Germany
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
T. T. A. Hoang, A. Knabe
1 Introduction In this study, we use data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014–2015 (Gershuny and Sullivan 2017) to examine the relationship between people’s labour market status and their cognitive and affective well-being. In particular, we analyse how the average level of enjoyment experienced during the day differs between the employed and the unemployed and contrast this with differences in the average life satisfaction of the two groups. We also use the diary data to differentiate the investigation of time use and enjoyment of employed and unemployed persons by weekdays and weekends. To the best of our knowledge, the UK Time-Use Survey is the first and the only nationally representative survey collecting, from each respondent, time use and self-assessed enjoyment for all activities of two entire 24-h days,
Data Loading...
