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While long-lasting declines in life satisfaction following unemployment have been well documented, evidence on the impact of unemployment on affective and eudaimonic well-being is scarce. Moreover, most existing studies relied on yearly panel data and were unable to separate the immediate effects of entering unemployment from prospective effects occurring before individuals become unemployed. The present study identified the immediate effects of entering unemployment on cognitive, affective and eudaimonic well-being facets using a control-group design based on monthly panel data of initially employed German jobseekers who were at high risk of losing their job. In order to investigate patterns of short-term adaptation, the study further examined whether average well-being levels change within the first months of unemployment using a mixed-effects trait-state-occasion model. All effects were separately computed for jobseekers affected by mass-layoffs or plant closures and individuals who registered as jobseekers due to other reasons. Multi-item instruments and experience sampling were used to validly measure the various well-being facets. The results indicate that life satisfaction and income satisfaction significantly decreased for individuals affected by mass-layoffs or plant closures from the last month in employment to the first month in unemployment. For individuals who registered as jobseekers due to other reasons, these effects were smaller and not significant in the case of life satisfaction. Crucially, there were no immediate effects of entering unemployment on the examined affective and eudaimonic well-being facets. Moreover, well-being levels were generally stable within the first months of unemployment indicating a general absence of short-term adaptation.

The German Job Search Panel (GJSP) comprises survey data from workers who registered as jobseekers expecting the termination of their jobs. The data include an exceptionally broad range of measures of health and well-being, among other information. A first cohort was invited to participate between November 2017 and May 2019 (Hetschko et al., 2022). In 2020, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the macroeconomic environment of the German labor market and, in the process, the challenges associated with job search. We therefore decided to sample a second cohort of initially employed jobseekers from July 2020 to February 2021 (GJSP 2.0). Combining the two GJSP cohorts allows researchers to examine if and how the pandemic altered the experience of job search. This data report describes the pandemic cohort of the GJSP, changes to sampling, recruitment and questionnaires compared to the first cohort and documents determinants of participation and panel attrition.

Individuals differ in how they react to unemployment. Yet, research on sources of interindividual differences in unemployment-related well-being changes is still in its infancy. Using monthly panel data of initially employed German jobseekers, this study examined whether the six trait-like dimensions of psychological well-being (PWB, e.g., autonomy, environmental mastery) buffer the negative effects of unemployment on various facets of subjective well-being (SWB). Further, re-employment expectations during unemployment and the reason for job loss (mass layoffs and plant closures vs. other reasons) were considered as central contextual features of unemployment.The results indicate substantial interindividual differences in unemployment-related changes across all examined SWB facets. However, dimensions of PWB did generally not moderate the effects of unemployment on SWB. Still, good re-employment prospects were related to increases in several well-being facets (e.g., leisure satisfaction, feeling awake) compared to being employed, whereas poor re-employment prospects were associated with particularly detrimental effects in terms of life satisfaction and income satisfaction. Overall, the study provides further evidence that contextual features of unemployment are particularly relevant for how individuals experience unemployment, whereas internal (coping) resources only seem to play a negligible role.

Reports an error in "The impact of unemployment on cognitive, affective, and eudaimonic well-being facets: Investigating immediate effects and short-term adaptation" by Mario Lawes, Clemens Hetschko, Ronnie Schöb, Gesine Stephan and Michael Eid (

For representative German panel data, we show that voluntary job switching leads to relatively high levels of life satisfaction, though only for some time, whereas the impact of exogenously triggered job changes is ambiguous. Risk aversion interacts negatively with this effect in life satisfaction. Analysing time-use data and well-being indicators for various areas of life, we find evidence that involuntary job mobility turns out to be harmful for satisfaction with family life. By linking this relatively new measure of family well-being to domestic events, such as future child births, our paper reveals a behaviourally valid predictor of great economic relevance.

Smartphone apps are increasingly being used for population-based survey research. Recruiting people to sign up for an app-based survey is, however, less straightforward compared to traditional surveys, which risks inflating nonresponse as well as the potential for nonresponse bias. By means of an experiment with over 44,000 recently registered job seekers, we present causal evidence on the effects of using different contact modes (email, postal letter, or preannouncement letter and email) on participation rates in an app-based panel survey. Further, using detailed administrative register data, we investigate whether contact modes differentially affect nonresponse bias. We also examine whether the mode of making contact has a lasting effect on panel participation rates and participation rates in momentary assessments collected using the experience sampling method (ESM). Overall, the preannouncement letter and email invitation strategy maximizes participation compared to stand-alone letters and emails, which do not differ significantly in terms of participation rates. Stand-alone letters and the preannouncement approach perform better than emails when it comes to panel participation and submitted ESM episodes.

This report introduces the German Job Search Panel, a monthly survey that follows people who registered as job seeking over the course of up to two years. The focus of the survey is on the well-being and health of jobseekers, with special emphasis on workers affected by mass layoffs. The use of an innovative survey app allows for frequent measurement every month and for conducting the experience sampling method to measure affective well-being. The collected data may be linked to administrative records of the Federal Employment Agency subject to participant consent. For a subsample of surveyed jobseekers hair cortisol levels are available as a biomarker for chronic stress. In this report, we describe the sampling procedure, adjustments over the recruitment period and the collected data. We moreover examine selective participation in the panel. It turns out that high-skilled workers, young individuals and women were more likely to sign up. Age increases the probability to take part in the hair sampling. People working in East Germany are more likely to consent to the linkage of survey data and administrative records. However, the aggregated bias resulting from selective participation is small.

We review the literature on the economics of happiness with respect to one of the most important areas of life: work. In particular, we document how different modes of employment, such as unemployment, self-employment or part-time employment affect subjective well-being. In contrast to traditional management research, we mostly rely on studies that use large-scale panel data and measures of happiness other than job satisfaction. This allows us to reveal the important part identity seems to play in the life of workers.

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according to their individual preferences. 11 broad dimensions aggregate these indicators. Our experiment shows that people do not provide consistent ratings across differently labelled dimensions that embed the same indicators. They also do not adjust the rating of equally named dimensions changing sets of indicators. These results show that survey-based measures might suffer from strong embedding effects and, as a result, may fail to measure citizens’ true preferences for the indicators.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility., Working papers series, ISSN 2628-1724, 2011, Heft 17

We use German panel data to examine how fixed-term employment affects utility derived from working. In contrast to previous research, we present evidence that working on a temporary contract lowers current job satisfaction. We discover that the honeymoon effect of a new job must be considered to reveal this result. Job insecurity appears to be the source of dissatisfaction associated with fixed-term employment. We also consider regional unemployment and perceived employment security to shed light on the basic notion of flexicurity policies. Finally, we apply a life course perspective on employment careers to discuss the overall role of temporary employment for individual job satisfaction. published

Using German panel data, this study compares responses of self-employed workers’ well-being and paid employees’ well-being to the loss of work. The empirical analyses show that life satisfaction decreases substantially more in the probability of losing work when self-employed than when paid-employed. It also turns out that becoming unemployed yields a much stronger decline in self-employed workers’ life satisfaction than in paid employees’ life satisfaction. Although these results do not necessarily represent causal effects, they indicate that losing self-employment is an even more harmful life event than losing dependent employment. Further analyses substantiate this conclusion. It is also shown that non-monetary reasons may explain much more than monetary reasons why the self-employed seem to suffer in particular from unemployment. In addition, the difference in the responses of well-being to unemployment between self-employed workers and paid-employed workers originates from varying levels of life satisfaction after terminating work, but not from divergent levels of life satisfaction before terminating work. One implication of these findings is that the potential psychological cost of unemployment might constitute a risk that prevents workers from going into business by themselves.

Previous studies find that past unemployment reduces life satisfaction even after reemployment for non-monetary reasons (unemployment scarring). It is not clear, however, whether this scarring is only caused by employment-related factors, such as worsened working conditions, or increased future uncertainty as regards income and employment. Using German panel data, we identify non-employment-related scarring by examining the transition of unemployed people to retirement as a life event after which employment-related scarring does not matter anymore. We find evidence for non-employment-related non-monetary unemployment scarring for people who were unemployed for the first time in their life directly prior to retirement, but not for people with earlier unemployment experiences.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility.