Job Loss or Income Loss: How the Detrimental Effect of Unemployment on Men's Life Satisfaction Differs by Immigration Status.

Irena Kogan,Jing Shen

doi:10.3389/fsoc.2020.00010

Abstract

Driven by the ongoing debate of job loss vs. income loss in understanding the detrimental effect of unemployment, this study examines how perceptions of unemployment and the resulting levels of life satisfaction differ by immigration status. Based on a countrywide longitudinal dataset in the UK, findings show that immigrant men's life satisfaction suffers more from the detrimental effect of job loss per se, whereas that of native-born men suffers more in the pecuniary respect, which is mainly driven by perceived financial strain, instead of objective income loss. By further examining the heterogeneity among immigrant men themselves, we find similar differences between recent non-EU immigrant men and the rest of the group. While job loss causes a deeper decline in life satisfaction for recent non-EU immigrant men, income loss causes a deeper decline in life satisfaction for recent EU and established immigrant men. We attribute those differences to the extent to which one's legal status in the country is vulnerable to unemployment.

Highlights

Based on robust evidence drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1990–2014), in their recent publication in Demography Leopold et al (2017) have argued that unemployment hurts life satisfaction of immigrant men more than that of their native-born counterparts
Findings in Models 1 through 4 show that: (1) unemployment has a detrimental impact on the level of men’s life satisfaction; (2) a part of the detrimental effect of unemployment is attributed to pecuniary reasons; (3) perceived financial strain or hardship plays a more important role than objective income loss in affecting unemployed men’s life satisfaction; and (4) with both objective and subjective measures of income loss taken into account, jobs loss by itself hurts life satisfaction more for immigrant men than their nativeborn counterparts
Existing literature about the detrimental effect of unemployment on life satisfaction has mainly been centered on the debate about the relative importance of job loss and income loss

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Based on robust evidence drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1990–2014), in their recent publication in Demography Leopold et al (2017) have argued that unemployment hurts life satisfaction of immigrant men more than that of their native-born counterparts. Findings in Models 1 through 4 show that: (1) unemployment has a detrimental impact on the level of men’s life satisfaction; (2) a part of the detrimental effect of unemployment is attributed to pecuniary reasons; (3) perceived financial strain or hardship plays a more important role than objective income loss in affecting unemployed men’s life satisfaction; and (4) with both objective and subjective measures of income loss taken into account, jobs loss by itself hurts life satisfaction more for immigrant men than their nativeborn counterparts. By comparing Models and 17, one can see that without controlling for measures of income loss, coefficients of unemployment are similar, and that a greater decline in life satisfaction of unemployed recent immigrant men mainly exists among those from non-EU countries.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

Findings

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT