Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment
By Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, Ronnie Schöb. 2014
152 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
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Citations in the corpus
- Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence (2015, background): “Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [10, 11]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could significantly improve the median quality of life.”