Thi Truong An Hoang and Andreas Knabe, “Time Use, Unemployment, and Well-being: an Empirical Analysis Using British Time-use Data.” CESifo Working Paper No. 7581, March 2019.
• Unemployment seems to lower subjective well-being (SWB) when measured as life satisfaction – but most people find the hours spent at their jobs not to be very happy.
• Perhaps the unemployed have better days, on average, than the employed, because the unemployed can shift time away from working and commuting – that is, the unemployed might win at SWB measured as (duration-weighted) affect, while losing in the life satisfaction measure of SWB.
• If an employed person and an unemployed person are both engaged in a leisure activity like listening to music, say, the employed person is likely to receive more satisfaction from it; this reflects the "saddening effect" of unemployment, where holding activities constant, the unemployed receive less pleasure from the activities than do the employed.
• But the unemployed are able to engage in relatively pleasurable activities more frequently than the employed: this is the "time-composition effect" of unemployment.
• In the authors' British time-use data, the employed hold the edge in life satisfaction and in "life being worthwhile" measures of SWB; work itself seems meaningful, but not particularly enjoyable.
• The unemployed sleep more, and watch tv more. They also spend more time looking for a job, and that is an activity that people do not enjoy.
• Despite the saddening effect of unemployment – when engaging in the same activity, the employed capture more happiness than do the unemployed – the unemployed capture more happiness (affect) in a typical day than do the employed, thanks to the time-composition effect. Working really is not all that happiness-inducing.
• People enjoy weekends more than weekdays, and the weekend bonus is greater for the employed.
• Incidentally, there's some US data that shows significant differences in time use between prime-age men who are not in the labor force versus the unemployed.
• All this work on posting this outline is making me sad.
