Abstract
We use nationally representative data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014/2015 to investigate how a person’s employment status is related to time use and cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective well-being. We do not find clear indications that employed and unemployed persons experience different average levels of emotional well-being when they engage in the same kinds of activities. For the employed, working belongs to one of the least enjoyable activities of their day. They also spend a large share of their time at work and on work-related activities. The unemployed, instead, spend more time on leisure and more enjoyable activities. When looking at duration-weighted average affective well-being over the entire waking time of the day, the unemployed experience, on average, more enjoyment than the employed. For the employed, the more hours they have to work on a specific day, the lower the average enjoyment they experience on that day. Differentiating the analyses by weekdays and weekends supports the finding that being able to freely allocate one’s non-work time is associated with higher levels of affective well-being. In line with previous studies on cognitive well-being, we find that the unemployed report substantially lower levels of life satisfaction than the employed.
Highlights
In this study, we use data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014–2015 (Gershuny and Sullivan 2017) to examine the relationship between people’s labour market status and their cognitive and affective well-being
In line with the previous literature, we find that unemployed persons have a lower overall life satisfaction compared to the employed
Contrary to its relation with life satisfaction, we find that net household income is significantly negatively associated with the level of daily affective well-being of individuals
Summary
We use data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014–2015 (Gershuny and Sullivan 2017) to examine the relationship between people’s labour market status and their cognitive and affective well-being. Knabe et al (2010) conduct a survey among unemployed and employed persons in Germany, collecting data on time use and emotions using the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman et al 2004b) They find that employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more positive and less negative feelings when engaged in similar activities. The UKTUS contains detailed information on people’s labour market status and job-search behaviour, which allows us to identify the employed and the unemployed based on objective criteria following the ILO definition as well as their own self-classification These specific features make it worthwhile to examine the differences in emotional well-being between employed and unemployed persons with the UKTUS.
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