You're Fired! The Causal Negative Effect of Entry Unemployment on Life Satisfaction

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Happiness at Different Ages: The Social Context Matters

This book presents a panoramic view of the implications from Richard Easterlin’s groundbreaking work on happiness and economics. Contributions in the book show the relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to main areas, such as the relationship between income and happiness, the relationship between economic growth and well-being, conceptions of progress and development, design and evaluation of policies for well-being, and the use of happiness research to address welfare economics issues. This book is unique in the sense that it gathers contributions from senior and top researchers in the economics of happiness, whom have played a central role in the consolidation of happiness economics, as well as promising young scholars, showing the current dynamism and consolidation of happiness economics.TRU

The perceived well-being and health costs of exiting self-employment

We explore how involuntary and voluntary exits from self-employment affect life and health satisfaction. To that end, we use rich longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1985 to 2017 and a difference-in-differences estimator. We find that while transitioning from self-employment to salaried employment brings small improvements in health and life satisfaction, the negative psychological costs of business failure (i.e., switching from self-employment to unemployment) are substantial and exceed the costs of involuntarily losing a salaried job. Meanwhile, leaving self-employment has no consequences for self-reported physical health and behaviors such as smoking and drinking, implying that the costs of losing self-employment are mainly psychological. Moreover, former business owners fail to adapt to an involuntary self-employment exit even 2 or more years after this traumatic event. Our findings imply that policies encouraging entrepreneurship should also carefully consider the nonmonetary implications of business failure