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Education and the Non-financial Employment Commitment in Times of Economic Recession Among the Youth

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the non-financial employment commitment using the so-called “lottery question”, which asks if you would continue working if you won the lottery. This is the first study that reports results using data from a Southern-European country and this is done both before and 3 years into the recession following the financial crisis of 2008. We find that the willingness to continue working in Spain is shockingly lower than in previous research done in other countries. Additionally, we find two important moderators of the non-financial employment commitment at the individual level. The willingness to work increases by education level and it is negatively correlated with the time spent searching for jobs. We find some regional effects, but in general, we do not find that the non-financial employment commitment is higher during the financial recession.

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Notes

  1. A recent paper might provide an explanation about why, in general, worse economic conditions lead to higher employment commitment. Başlevent and Kirmanoğlu (2014) show that job insecurity increases life satisfaction associated with having any job, even a less-desired job.

  2. We also tried including two other job-related variables: contract type and firm size, but neither of the variables were statistically significant at the 5% significance level in both years, so we decided not to include them in the model.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Fundación Bancaja e Ivie (Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas) for supplying us with their survey data (Observatorio de Inserción Laboral de los Jóvenes.). L. Miller acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Grant ECO2015-67105-R) and the Basque Government (research group IT-783-13). P. Mariel acknowledges support from the Department of the Environment of the Basque Government and the Department of Education of the Basque Government (grant IT-642-13; UPV/EHU Econometrics Research Group) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (ECO2014-52587-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Simona Demel

  2. School of Economics and Business, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Av. Lehendakari Aguirre 83, 48015, Bilbao, Spain

    Simona Demel, Petr Mariel & Luis Miller

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  1. Simona Demel
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  2. Petr Mariel
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  3. Luis Miller
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Correspondence to Luis Miller.

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Demel, S., Mariel, P. & Miller, L. Education and the Non-financial Employment Commitment in Times of Economic Recession Among the Youth. Soc Indic Res 140, 795–810 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1789-8

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