TY - JOUR
T1 - How Satisfied are the Self-Employed? A Life Domain View
AU - Binder, Martin
AU - Coad, Alex
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Simon Parker for many helpful comments. We also want to thank two anonymous referees for their suggestions. This research was funded by the ESRC-TSB-BIS-NESTA as part of the ES/J008427/1 grant on Skills, Knowledge, Innovation, Policy and Practice (SKIPPY). The data used in this publication were made available to us by the German Socio Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. The usual caveat applies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Copyright:
Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/8/1
Y1 - 2016/8/1
N2 - It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the effects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare effects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as different domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German sample from 1997 to 2010. Using matching estimators to create an appropriate control group and differentiating between different types of self-employment, we find that voluntary self-employment brings with it positive benefits apart from work satisfaction, and leads to higher overall life satisfaction as well as increased health satisfaction, all of which increase in the first three years of self-employment. Being forced into self-employment to escape unemployment, however, confers no such benefits. Additionally, both types of self-employment lead to increasing dissatisfaction with one’s leisure time.
AB - It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the effects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare effects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as different domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German sample from 1997 to 2010. Using matching estimators to create an appropriate control group and differentiating between different types of self-employment, we find that voluntary self-employment brings with it positive benefits apart from work satisfaction, and leads to higher overall life satisfaction as well as increased health satisfaction, all of which increase in the first three years of self-employment. Being forced into self-employment to escape unemployment, however, confers no such benefits. Additionally, both types of self-employment lead to increasing dissatisfaction with one’s leisure time.
KW - Domain satisfaction
KW - Matching estimators
KW - SOEP
KW - Self-employment
KW - Subjective well-being
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84931341072&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84931341072&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10902-015-9650-8
DO - 10.1007/s10902-015-9650-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84931341072
VL - 17
SP - 1409
EP - 1433
JO - Journal of Happiness Studies
JF - Journal of Happiness Studies
SN - 1389-4978
IS - 4
ER -