Economics Seminar Series - Ronnie Schöb: The German Job Search Panel – First Results on the Immediate Effects of Unemployment on Subjective Wellbeing and Physiological Stress

You are invited to a seminar by Ronnie Schöb on 'The German Job Search Panel – First Results on the Immediate Effects of Unemployment on Subjective Wellbeing and Physiological Stress'

All welcome! Tea, coffee and cake will be provided for attendees.

Register here to attend.

Abstract

Research into the health and wellbeing effects of unemployment over time may help to better individually tailor and hence more efficiently design active labour market policies. The German Job Search Panel is a new monthly panel survey that follows workers who registered as job seeking over the course of up to two years. The focus is on the wellbeing and health of jobseekers, with special emphasis on workers affected by mass layoffs. Two features of the data are particularly novel: The use of a smartphone survey app allows for frequent measurement and for conducting the experience sampling method to measure affective wellbeing. Physiological wellbeing is measured based on the concentration of hair cortisol, a reliable biomarker of chronic stress. In the first study presented, we analyse the immediate effects of entering unemployment on cognitive and affective wellbeing facets. We can confirm that life satisfaction and income satisfaction significantly decrease for individuals affected by mass layoffs from the last month in employment to the first month in unemployment. By contrast, there were no immediate effects of entering unemployment on affective wellbeing. The second study presented examines whether unemployment is related to changes in hair cortisol. The results indicate that hair cortisol is the highest initially when individuals are insecurely employed and decreases as they gain certainty about whether they enter unemployment or not. We find no differences when comparing the average changes in hair cortisol between individuals who entered unemployment to those of continuously employed individuals. However, when unemployment persists, re-employment prospects gain importance. Medium-term unemployment was associated with a stronger mean increase in hair cortisol if re-employment expectations were low compared to when re-employment expectations were high.