Abstract
The effects of the global financial crisis on workers’ anxiety are examined using panel data from Australia. Australia presents a unique opportunity to estimate anxiety effects as it emerged from the crisis period without enduring a recession and the economy rebounded very quickly. Our estimates focus on workers who are overeducated and their perceptions of job security; this group are known to have lower levels of satisfaction with job security and so offer a baseline estimate from which to evaluate changes associated with the crisis. We argue that a workers level of commitments and responsibilities would be important in determining anxiety effects. The results support this contention; partnered workers exhibit significantly lower satisfaction with job security after the crisis and this is increased if children are present. More objective assessments of their employment stability and their financial conditions following the crisis were also examined. These factors did not seem to explain the relative changes in job security satisfaction, suggesting these were more likely to be general anxiety effects.
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Notes
Overeducation is defined via the Job analysis/objective method (see Hartog 2000 for a greater elucidation of this method). In brief, an overeducated worker is an individual who holds paper qualifications above and beyond the minimum required to do the job they are employed in. The non-overeducated individuals include not just those with paper qualifications required to do their job but also the undereducated (i.e. those undertaking their job without the minimum educational requirements to do their job). This group is commonly made up of those with greater levels of experience promoted into managerial occupations. As such, their ‘non-job match’ is not commonly seen as being an issue.
The consumer sentiment index is made up of an average of the Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Rating and Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index. The long-run average is nornmalised to 100 and the index stood at 80 by the end of 2008.
Newer waves are replenished for attrition though the potential for attrition bias still exists.
To be more specific, Mavromaras et al. (2012) are not claiming that the studies assuming cardinality on ordered variables present misleading results, rather one needs to exercise caution when making such assumptions as there is a potential (albeit a minimal one given past research) for results to differ when ordinality and cardinality are assumed.
See Cameron and Trivedi (2005) (sec 21.7) for the detailed proof.
The estimated overeducated coefficients are quantitatively similar to those reported by Piper (2012) for young overeducated workers in the UK using dynamic panel methods with life satisfaction as the dependent variable.
As the dependent variable ranges from 0 to 100 we assume it to be continuous.
As noted in the data section, not all waves included this variable. Hence, the observations are lower than in the other estimates.
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Acknowledgments
This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.
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Kler, P., Leeves, G. & Shankar, S. Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself: Perceptions of Job Security in Australia After the Global Financial Crisis. Soc Indic Res 123, 753–769 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0759-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0759-7