The effect of unemployment on life satisfaction : a cross-national comparison between Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States / by Wen-Hao Chen and Feng Hou. : CS11-0019/408E-PDF

"This paper investigates the effect of unemployment on life satisfaction from a comparative perspective. It also tests whether the link between unemployment and life satisfaction is moderated or reinforced by contextual unemployment across regions within a country—either through a negative spillover or a positive social-norm effect, or both. The results suggest that noticeable non-pecuniary costs are associated with unemployment in the four countries studied. Cross-national differences also emerged in the impact of the moderating factors. Others’ unemployment, that is, overall regional unemployment, is a strong moderating factor of own unemployment in Canada and to a lesser extent in the United States; the effect is ambiguous in the United Kingdom and exacerbating in Germany. The results also support a negative spillover effect of others’ unemployment on the employed in the United States and Germany, no spillover effect in the United Kingdom and, surprisingly, a positive overall spillover effect in Canada. Sensitivity testing further revealed that this Canadian anomaly was a phenomenon mainly in Atlantic Canada, not across the whole country"--Abstract, p. 5.

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