Publication type
Journal Article
Series Number
Authors
Publication date
May 1, 2023
Summary:
The notion that self-employed individuals are more satisfied with their jobs than wage-employees has found broad empirical support. Previous research exploring the well-being effects of self-employment typically relies on direct cross-sectional comparisons between wage-employees and self-employed or on longitudinal investigations of transitions in or out of self-employment. In this study, the authors use individuals’ employment status histories in British longitudinal data to examine how accumulated self-employment experience affects job satisfaction, satisfaction with leisure and satisfaction with income. The study finds that those with past work experience only as self-employed report higher levels of job satisfaction than those with experience only as wage-employees. However, individuals with mixed work experience profiles are the most satisfied. This suggests a non-monotonic relationship between self-employment and job satisfaction. Patterns of self-employment experience and other satisfaction domains, such as satisfaction with income or leisure, are more nuanced, differing across gender lines.
Published in
Economic and Industrial Democracy
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 44 , p.454 -480
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X221086017
ISSN
0143831
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial 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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