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Poverty and Time

Moving up or moving out? Transitions through part-time employment in Britain and Germany

A central issue underlying the concept of transitional labour markets is that moving between different employment statuses can lead to social integration rather than exclusion. In this chapter we assess the extent to which part-time work provides an integrating bridge for those outside the labour market in Britain and Germany. Structural divisions in a given labour market can have a significant effect ...

Deconstructing the hedonic treadmill: Is happiness autoregressive?

Affective habituation is well-documented in social sciences: people seem to adapt to many life events, ranging from lottery windfalls to terminal illnesses. A group of studies have tried to measure habituation by seeing how lagged values of life events affect present happiness. We propose an additional adaptation channel: current happiness may depend directly on past happiness, which amounts to assessing ...

Early Career Mobility and Earning Profiles of German Apprentices: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Understanding fixed effects in human well-being

In studies of subjective well-being, economists and other researchers typically use a fixed or random effect estimation to control for unobservable heterogeneity across individuals. Such individual heterogeneity, although substantially reducing the estimated effect of many characteristics, is little understood. This paper shows that personality measures can account for 20% of this heterogeneity and ...

Personality and the marginal utility of income: Personality interacts with increases in household income to determine life satisfaction

Economics implicitly assumes that the marginal utility of income is independent of an individual's personality. We show that this is wrong. This is the first demonstration that there are strong personality–income interactions. In an analysis of 13,615 individuals over 4-years we show that individuals who have high levels of conscientiousness obtain more satisfaction to their lives from increases ...

Personality Prior to Disability Determines Adaptation: Agreeable Individuals Recover Lost Life Satisfaction Faster and More Completely

Personality traits prior to the onset of illness or disability may influence how well an individual psychologically adjusts after the illness or disability has occurred. Previous research has shown that after the onset of a disability, people initially experience sharp drops in life satisfaction, and the ability to regain lost life satisfaction is at best partial. However, such research has not investigated ...

Money, Well-Being, and Loss Aversion: Does an Income Loss Have a Greater Effect on Well-Being Than an Equivalent Income Gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses affect well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined in relation to decisions about anticipated outcomes. Here, using subjective-well-being data from Germany (N = 28,723) and the United Kingdom (N = 20,570), we found that losses in income have a larger effect on ...

The dark side of conscientiousness: Conscientious people experience greater drops in life satisfaction following unemployment

Conscientious individuals tend to achieve more and have higher well-being. This has led to a view that conscientiousness is always positive for well-being. We hypothesize that conscientiousness could be detrimental to well-being when failure is experienced, such as when individuals become unemployed. In a 4-year longitudinal study of 9570 individuals interviewed yearly we show that the drop in an individual’s ...

Personality Change Following Unemployment

Unemployment has a strongly negative influence on well-being, but it is unclear whether it also alters basic personality traits. Whether personality changes arise through natural maturation processes or contextual/environmental factors is still a matter of debate. Unemployment, a relatively unexpected and commonly occurring life event, may shed light on the relevance of context for personality change. ...