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Europeans Work to Live and Americans Live to Work (Who is Happy to Work More: Americans or Europeans?)

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Abstract

This paper compares the working hours and life satisfaction of Americans and Europeans using the World Values Survey, Eurobarometer and General Social Survey. The purpose is to explore the relationship between working hours and happiness in Europe and America. Previous research on the topic does not test the premise that working more makes Americans happier than Europeans. The findings suggest that Americans may be happier working more because they believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with success.

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Notes

  1. Note that happiness means general life satisfaction or happiness, not job satisfaction. The focus here is on the life satisfaction literature and modeling.

  2. The goal of this paper is to document a relationship between working hours and happiness in the US and Europe. A more theoretical account has been provided elsewhere, see Alesina et al. (2005) for instance.

  3. Life satisfaction and happiness are conceptually different. The former refers to cognition while the latter refers to affect. For simplicity I use them interchangeably and specifically I mean life satisfaction.

  4. Choice of these years is determined by data availability for Europe, so that Europeans and Americans were surveyed approximately at the same time.

  5. Still, robustness of the results can be improved if wording of the survey questions is the same for all respondents. This remains for the future research when better data become available.

  6. For a list of European countries and American regions see Appendix 1. There is a statistically and substantively significant variation across European countries in average happiness, but country-level analysis is difficult due to small sample sizes.

  7. For categories see Table 3 in Appendix 1.

  8. These models may suffer from left out variable bias, however. Additional controls are used in separate models for the US and Europe. Results are shown in Appendix 3. The relationship is robust: in all models Europeans are less happy than Americans when working longer hours.

  9. Figure 2 utilizes postgr3 by Michael Mitchell and spostado by Scott Long in Stata .

  10. This is a hypothetical scenario. Again, as argued in this paper, for Europeans it makes sense to work less and for Americans to work more.

  11. However, this relationship is not necessarily causal for two main reasons. Data is cross-sectional, and it is not entirely clear what is the direction of causality here, although it seems more reasonable that working more makes Americans happier than that happier Americans work more than Europeans. If the reader has ideas about enhancing causal inference, please email me.

  12. For ease of exposition variables were recoded so that higher value means that work is more important. Responses to these questions were standardized so that they are comparable in Fig. 3.

  13. Again, there is a need for more research on this: There may be other plausible explanations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn

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  1. Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn
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Correspondence to Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn.

Additional information

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn is indebted to Micah Altman and Ben Gaddis.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Figs. 4 and 5, Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Fig. 4
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Happiness in America and Europe

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Fig. 5
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Working hours in America and Europe

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Table 3 Seven categories of working hours
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Table 4 Data sets
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Table 5 European countries
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Table 6 American regions
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Appendix 2

See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22

Table 7 Variables comparable across datasets: survey questions
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Table 8 Variables incomparable across datasets: survey questions
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Table 9 GSS: family time
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Table 10 GSS: extra hours
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Table 11 GSS: friends
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Table 12 GSS: health
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Table 13 GSS: occupation
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Table 14 EB96: family time
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Table 15 EB96: extra hours
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Table 16 EB96: friends
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Table 17 EB96: occupation
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Table 18 EB01: family time
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Table 19 EB01: extra hours
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Table 20 EB01: friends
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Table 21 EB01: health
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Table 22 EB01: occupation
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Appendix 3

See Tables 23, 24, 25, 26 and 27.

Table 23 Ordered logistic regressions of happiness by survey: extra hours (odds ratios reported)
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Table 24 Ordered logistic regressions of happiness by survey: family time (odds ratios reported)
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Table 25 Ordered logistic regressions of happiness by survey: health (odds ratios reported)
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Table 26 Ordered logistic regressions of happiness by survey: friends (odds ratios reported)
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Table 27 Ordered logistic regressions of happiness by survey: occupation (odds ratios reported)
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Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. Europeans Work to Live and Americans Live to Work (Who is Happy to Work More: Americans or Europeans?). J Happiness Stud 12, 225–243 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-010-9188-8

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