Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
December 15, 2022
Summary:
This article demonstrates how the unemployment of neighbours can ameliorate the psychological costs of unemployment. In support of this premise, we find that while unemployment is always harmful, the gap in psychological well-being between employed and unemployed individuals is much less in relatively high unemployment neighbourhoods (particularly so for males and relatively older cohorts). Our proposed explanation is that people employ close points of social comparison with the result that any feelings of shame or embarrassment associated with unemployment are mitigated when surrounded by unemployed neighbours. One potentially important labour market implication of these findings is that it may be more difficult than anticipated to transition some people out of unemployment in high unemployment neighbourhoods. Apart from highlighting the place-specific nature of the relationship between unemployment and psychological well-being, our findings also highlight the importance of non-pecuniary factors, such as the social norm to work, in explaining the substantive negative psychological impact of unemployment.
Published in
Work, Employment and Society
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 36 , p.1 -1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211003483
ISSN
9500170
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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