CHAIR OF

PUBLIC ECONOMICS

We analyze how differences in the frequency and intensity of social contacts contribute to the experienced well-being of employed and unemployed individuals. In the UK Time-Use Survey, we observe that people generally enjoy being with others more than being alone. The unemployed tend to feel worse than the employed when engaging in the same kind of activities, partly because they are more often alone. The unemployed cannot spend time with other people at work but spend slightly more time with private contacts than the employed. In terms of experienced well-being, the slight increase in time spent with family and friends (which people enjoy a lot) offsets the loss of work contacts (which people generally enjoy only a little). Hence, we do not find that the differences in the social-contact composition between the employed and the unemployed are associated with differences in their experienced well-being.

The publication can be found here.

This paper examines the relationship between flexible working arrangements (FWA) and workers' affective well-being (AWB), using data from the American Time-Use Survey (ATUS) and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). We analyze differences in workers' emotional experiences during paid work, unpaid work, and leisure depending on the general availability of FWA within their occupation. Our findings reveal a significant negative association between teleworkability and AWB during labor activities for women, resulting in reduced day-average emotional well-being if jobs are also time-flexible. In contrast, we do not find significant associations between FWA and AWB during paid work for men. Additionally, we find no evidence of systematic spillovers to the AWB in non-labor activities for both men and women. Further nuanced findings regarding parents and the role of time flexibility underscore potential gender differences in the impact of FWA on well-being.

Find the discussion paper  here.

 The publication is available here.

This paper examines possible spillover effects of parental unemployment on the subjective wellbeing of 12- to 21-year-old children. Using German panel data (SOEP), we show that unemployment of fathers and mothers is negatively associated with their children’s life satisfaction. When controlling for time-invariant individual heterogeneity, our results suggest that maternal unemployment has negative effects, while no effect of fathers’ unemployment can be detected. In subgroup analyses, we do not find differential impacts between sons and daughters or between younger and older children. Further results suggest that the impact of parental unemployment differs between high- and low-unemployment regions.

The working paper can be found here.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we analyse the incidence and worker-level consequences of on-call work, a work arrangement that allows employers to adjust their employees’ working times flexibly to the workload. We find that around 4%–5% of the workforce was employed in on-call work between 2014 and 2019. On-call workers are on average less educated, have lower tenure and more unemployment experience. They are also more often employed in marginal part-time jobs and smaller firms. On-call workers have a higher discrepancy between contractual and actual working hours and a higher probability of having no working hours stipulated in their contracts, which points towards less security regarding working hours and expected incomes. We also find evidence for lower wages and decreased subjective well-being along various dimensions but these results only apply to women and not to men.

The publication can be found here.