Unemployment and subjective well-being among the youth: evidence from a longitudinal study in Poland

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of becoming unemployed on the well-being of young people. Particularly, we examine to what extent this relationship is moderated by the local unemployment rate. To address this topic, we use the Polish longitudinal dataset: Social Diagnosis: Objective and Subjective Quality of Life in Poland (2005-2015). Using a fixed effect model, we find that young individuals who lost a job feel worse off than their counterparts who remained employed, and that these effects differ by gender, with men being more susceptible to changes in the employment status. Moreover, we show that the impact of unemployment on the well-being of men is the smaller the higher the unemployment rate is. However, contrary to expectations, this effect is driven by the decreasing well-being of employed men and not by a decline in the distress level of unemployed men when aggregate unemployment grows

Unemployment and Subjective Well-being Among the Youth: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Poland

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of becoming unemployed on the well-being of young people. Particularly, we examine to what extent this relationship is moderated by the local unemployment rate. To address this topic, we use the Polish longitudinal dataset: Social Diagnosis: Objective and Subjective Quality of Life in Poland (2005-2015).Using a fixed effect model, we find that young individuals who lost a job feel worse off than their counterparts who remained employed, and that these effects differ by gender, with men being more susceptible to changes in the employment status. Moreover, we show that the impact of unemployment on the well-being of men is the smaller the higher the unemployment rate is. However, contrary to expectations, this effect is driven by the decreasing well-being of employed men and not by a decline in the distress level of unemployed men when aggregate unemployment grows.

Wage premia for skills: the complementarity of cognitive and non-cognitive skills

Purpose - The main purpose of this paper is to assess the degree of complementarity between cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, and to evaluate their joint impact on individual wages. Design/methodology/approach – The author uses a survey representative of the Polish working-age population with well-established measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Findings - Non-cognitive skills are important in the labour market, not only as separate factors that influence wages, but as complements to cognitive skills. Specifically, the analysis showed that the more neurotic an individual is, the lower his or her returns to cognitive skills are. Social skills were not shown to be complementary to cognitive skills in Poland, unlike the recent results in the United States. Originality/value - To the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence that neurotic individuals have lower returns to cognitive skills. It also tests the existence of the complementarity between social and cognitive skills

Unemployment and Subjective Well-being Among the Youth: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in Poland

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of becoming unemployed on the well-being of young people. Particularly, we examine to what extent this relationship is moderated by the local unemployment rate. To address this topic, we use the Polish longitudinal dataset: Social Diagnosis: Objective and Subjective Quality of Life in Poland (2005-2015). Using a fixed effect model, we find that young individuals who lost a job feel worse off than their counterparts who remained employed, and that these effects differ by gender, with men being more susceptible to changes in the employment status. Moreover, we show that the impact of unemployment on the well-being of men is the smaller the higher the unemployment rate is. However, contrary to expectations, this effect is driven by the decreasing well-being of employed men and not by a decline in the distress level of unemployed men when aggregate unemployment grows

Personality, cognitive skills and life outcomes: evidence from the Polish follow-up study to PIAAC

Abstract Background There is a growing literature providing evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for life outcomes. However, to date there is limited evidence on the gains from incorporating such measures into large-scale competence surveys. Methods We investigate the relationship between personality traits and eight important life outcomes: educational attainment, labour market participation, employability, wages, job satisfaction, health, trust and life satisfaction measured in the Polish follow-up study to PIAAC. The study assesses two short scales: the Big Five Inventory and Grit. First, we compare explanatory power of personality traits to that of cognitive skills measured by PIAAC. Second, an incremental validity of Grit after controlling for the Big Five dimensions is assessed. Results The analyses show that differences in personality traits are important in explaining differences in life outcomes. Educational attainment is more strongly related to cognitive skills, while for wages, the explanatory power of personality and cognitive skills is similar. For most of the subjective outcomes, the Big Five traits outperform cognitive skills in predictive power. Conscientiousness is positively related to most of the outcomes analysed while Neuroticism has a negative relationship. After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and cognitive skills, Big Five traits add explanatory power to all models except for employability. Grit explains some additional variation in educational attainment and in a number of subjective outcomes: health, trust, job and life satisfaction, even after adjusting for the effects of cognitive skills and Big Five traits. Conclusions Given the potential benefits and relatively small burden on respondents in terms of required time it seems advisable to incorporate measures of personality traits into competence surveys as they contribute to explaining the variability in policy-relevant outcomes. The use of the Big Five Inventory seems preferable to Grit when a broad range of life outcomes is of interest, as the former covers multiple aspects of personality. However, using both scales offers an improvement in explanatory power

ICT skills measurement in social surveys: Can we trust self-reports?

Self-reports are the most common way of measuring information and communications technology (ICT) skills in social surveys. Studies comparing self-reported computer skills with objective assessments have found evidence of significant overreporting of skills, but were conducted only among non-representative groups of individuals. This paper fills an important gap by analysing the degree to which ICT skills are overreported in the working-age population of Poland, and the potential causes of this behaviour. We compare answers to Eurostat questions on ICT usage with direct assessments of the corresponding tasks. The results suggest that those individuals who are most likely to possess ICT skills are also most likely to overreport having these skills. The propensity to overreport decreases with age and increases with years of education and numeracy level; women are less likely than men to overestimate their skills. The positive relationship between the probability of a group to overreport their own skills and their expected levels of skills suggests that social desirability bias may explain this phenomenon

MOESM3 of Personality, cognitive skills and life outcomes: evidence from the Polish follow-up study to PIAAC

Additional file 3. Numeracy—full estimation results (OLS) Tables S1–S8