Subjective Well-Being of Atypically Employed
A report by Tatiana Karabchuk, Natalia Soboleva, and Marina Nikitina at the regular LSCR seminar
On May, 30, Deputy Director of the LCSR Tatiana Karabchuk, junior research fellow Natalia Soboleva and research assistant Marina Nikitina delivered a report on the project "Subjective Well-Being of Atypically Employed". The project is aimed at revealing the impact of difference in institutional background (labour legislation) upon subjective well-being through atypical employment.
Index of subjective well-being (SWB) was constructed using two variables from the European Social Survey 2010: happiness and life satisfaction. Authors point out four types of atypical employment: temporary, informal, part-time and self-employment. EPL (employment protection legislation) and long-term unemployment rate serve as the indicators of the strictness of labor market regulation in different countries. Such variables as human development index, gender, income, age, education, marital status, number of children were used as controls.
The researchers suggested that while countries differ in labor market regulations (which means strictness or openness of the economy), strong overregulation should lead to the increase of atypical employment. The letter, as authors assumed, should affect people in a negative way especially in case of informal and temporary at both individual and aggregated levels. Authors run OLS regressions and multilevel models and came to the conclusions that temporary employment had a negative impact and self-employment had a positive impact on SWB. Positive and robust effect of part-time employment on SWB is shown for women. Generally age has a negative impact on SWB, but people in the middle age are less happy than those who are older. Besides, the authors have proven that the strictness of the labor market regulation has a certain effect on SWB. High EPL index and high long-term unemployment rate lead to a lower subjective well-being in the country. The effect of self-employment on life satisfaction is weaker in the countries with a stricter labor market regulation. The authors demonstrated empirically that job satisfaction has a strong impact on SWB, job satisfaction effects the SWB of self-employed.
In the discussion that followed the report the listeners mentioned that OLS and multilevel regression models have shown similar results. The discussants suggested using simple OLS regressions due to a small number of countries. On the contrary, using multilevel models would be practical as it provides with better information for the groups missing. Still splitting the information into different groups of countries would be useless. Besides it was suggested to include characteristics of jobs in the models. Professor Inglehart claimed that it is not relevant to include job satisfaction in the model because it is one of the major components of subjective well-being and for that reason determines it more.
by Ekaterina Lytkina