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Life satisfaction and unemployment in Turkey: evidence from Life Satisfaction Surveys 2004–2013

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Abstract

This paper has three purposes. First, it explores the relationship between unemployment and well-being in Turkey using data from Life Satisfaction Surveys for the period between 2004 and 2013. Second, it examines to what extent joblessness at the household level interacts with own unemployment. Third, it tests whether the negative effect of unemployment on well-being varies with individuals’ own perceptions of their labor market prospects. Consistent with the other studies in the literature, findings indicate that the unemployed experience significantly lower levels of life satisfaction than the employed. While the results do not provide support for the social norm effect at the household level, they do indicate that that the impact of labor market status on well-being varies with the job prospects. There is also suggestive evidence that women and men are similarly affected by unemployment and job prospects.

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Notes

  1. See Di Tella and MacCulloch (2006) and Dolan et al. (2008) for reviews, and Frey and Stutzer (2013) for an overview of recent developments in this area.

  2. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Goldsmith et al. (1996) document that past unemployment and inactivity have an adverse effect on current self-esteem.

  3. Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004) show that the assumption of ordinality or cardinality of the dependent variable yields similar results in well-being estimations. Despite the availability of latent variable models to model ordinal dependent variables, OLS will be used in this paper for brevity of presentation and ease of interpretation. An earlier version of this paper estimates an ordered probit model. Table 8 in the Appendix presents the average marginal effects from estimating the model by ordered probit. Findings confirm that both OLS and ordered probit produce equivalent results. Approximate likelihood-ratio test of equality of coefficients across response categories yields χ2(81) = 1279.82 with Prob > χ2 = 0.0000. Hence, the null hypothesis of parallel slopes is rejected.

  4. In 2013, the brackets were 0–1080, 1081–1550, 1551–2170, 2171–3180, 3181+, all in Turkish liras.

  5. Caner (2015) follows the procedure suggested by Van Praag and Ferrer-i Carbonell (2008).

  6. Using data from 73 countries, Zweig (2015) find that women are at least as happy as men in nearly all of the countries.

  7. As a robustness check, an ordered probit model was estimated by job prospects. Results (not presented) are qualitatively similar to those in Table 5.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Işık University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Z. Bilgen Susanlı

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  1. Z. Bilgen Susanlı
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Correspondence to Z. Bilgen Susanlı.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7, 8, and 9.

Table 7 Descriptive statistics.
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Table 8 Ordered probit estimation: average marginal effects
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Table 9 Annual regression estimations
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Susanlı, Z.B. Life satisfaction and unemployment in Turkey: evidence from Life Satisfaction Surveys 2004–2013. Qual Quant 52, 479–499 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0479-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0479-6

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