Papers by Kelsey O'Connor
Social Science Research Network, 2023
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2020
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2019
Average subjective well-being decreased in Europe during the Great Recession, primarily among peo... more Average subjective well-being decreased in Europe during the Great Recession, primarily among people with less than a college education and people younger than retirement age. However, some countries fared better than others depending on their labor market policies. More generous unemployment support, which provided income replacement or programs to assist unemployed workers find jobs, mitigated the negative effects for most of the population, although not youth. In contrast, stricter employment protection legislation exacerbated the negative effects. We present further evidence that suggests the exacerbating effects of employment protection legislation are due to greater rigidities in the labor market, which in turn affect perceived future job prospects. Our analysis is based on two-stage least squares regressions using individual subjective wellbeing data obtained from Eurobarometer surveys and variation in labor market policy across 23 European countries.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, May 1, 2023
Every country in Europe experienced an adverse impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfac... more Every country in Europe experienced an adverse impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction, though on average, satisfaction with life in the summer of 2022 is about the same as the pre-pandemic value in the autumn of 2019. Typically, an upsurge in the severity of the pandemic (measured by the number of COVID-related deaths) is associated with declining life satisfaction and an ebbing, with increasing life satisfaction. Of the three waves of the pandemic between March 2020 and the autumn of 2022, the most severe impact typically occurred in 2021 during the second wave; in the third wave, the response declined due to the spread of effective vaccines and the takeover of omicron variants.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Feb 23, 2023
Social Science Research Network, 2022
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Sep 6, 2022
In Europe, differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s h... more In Europe, differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs—increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal conclusion from a time-series study of 10 Northern, Western, and Southern European countries with the requisite data. In the present study, cross-section analysis of recent data gives a misleading impression that economic growth, social capital, and/or quality of the environment are driving happiness trends, but in the long-term, time-series data, these variables have no relation to happiness.
Social Science Research Network, 2017
Psychological measures are gaining recognition as important determinants of labor performance. Th... more Psychological measures are gaining recognition as important determinants of labor performance. This paper demonstrates that people reporting higher subjective well-being (SWB) are less likely to be unemployed. A one standard deviation increase in lagged SWB is associated with approximately a one percentage point decrease in the probability of being unemployed. The mechanisms include changes in the Big-Five personality traits. Within-person increases in extraversion or emotional stability, for example, are associated with increases in SWB. The results also show that the magnitude of the SWB-unemployed relation is substantially larger for people who are currently unemployed, but also too much SWB can be a bad thing, because the SWB-unemployed relation is quadratic. The results are based on separate dynamic and fixed-effects regressions, and supported by Arellano and Bond, generalized methods of moments, type estimations. The data come from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2013).
Oxford Economic Papers-new Series, Aug 23, 2021
Whether economic growth improves the human lot is a matter of conditions. We focus on Japan, a co... more Whether economic growth improves the human lot is a matter of conditions. We focus on Japan, a country which shifted in the 1990s from a pattern of rampant economic growth and stagnant well-being, to one of modest growth and increasing well-being. We discuss concurrent policy reforms and analyse the changes in well-being. In particular, we assess whether the correlates of the increase in well-being are consistent with those expected from the reforms. We apply Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to World Values Survey data. Results show that improved conditions for the elderly, parents and women, that is the primary groups targeted by the reforms, correlate with well-being increases. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that social safety nets can make economic growth compatible with sustained increases in well-being.
Journal of Happiness Studies, May 17, 2021
Average subjective well-being decreased in Europe during the Great Recession, primarily among peo... more Average subjective well-being decreased in Europe during the Great Recession, primarily among people with less than a college education and people younger than retirement age. However, some countries fared better than others depending on their labor market policies. More generous unemployment support, which provided income replacement or programs to assist unemployed workers find jobs, mitigated the negative effects for most of the population, although not youth. In contrast, stricter employment protection legislation exacerbated the negative effects. We present further evidence that suggests the exacerbating effects of employment protection legislation are due to greater rigidities in the labor market, which in turn affect perceived future job prospects. Our analysis is based on two-stage least squares regressions using individual subjective wellbeing data obtained from Eurobarometer surveys and variation in labor market policy across 23 European countries.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Jan 15, 2021
Review of behavioral economics, 2020
This is a response to a recently published comment by David G. Blanchflower (2020a) regarding the... more This is a response to a recently published comment by David G. Blanchflower (2020a) regarding the earlier paper entitled “Experienced Life Cycle Satisfaction in Europe†(Morgan and O’Connor, 2017), hereafter MO. Blanchflower critiques MO, obtaining a distinct pattern of life satisfaction over the life cycle using a different sample. We take this distinction as further supporting the main conclusion in MO, that more rigor should be applied in assessing the relation between life satisfaction and age, especially in choosing controls and by using non-parametric methods. Our response speaks to the broader literature. Many previous studies limit the number of possible shapes by imposing a quadratic relation, or describe the relation in quadratic terms. MO describes the pattern between life satisfaction and age in more detail and offers evidence, immune to Blanchflower’s critique, that the U-shape relation is in fact not everywhere.
Social Science Research Network, 2022
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Resources Policy, Aug 1, 2018
The resource curse is a topic studied intensively in both economics and political science. Much o... more The resource curse is a topic studied intensively in both economics and political science. Much of the focus is now on whether oil affects democratic institutions. We further the debate on this aspect through the use of both additional measures of democracy and multiple time-series estimation strategies. We find no robust long-run effect of oil abundance on any of the following measures of democracy: Polity, Polcon, Civil Liberties, or Political Rights, over the period 1974-2012. We use different country and period samples to respond to the findings of others suggesting that the effects of oil abundance may differ between Latin America, the Middle East, mature oil producers, or that they become significantly negative only post-1980. In each case we still do not find a robust relationship. We emphasize long-run effects not only because they match the slow pace of institutional change, but also because they are consistent even in the presence of reverse causality.
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2017
The lowest level of reported happiness since the 1970s occurred in 2010, which was the result of ... more The lowest level of reported happiness since the 1970s occurred in 2010, which was the result of a negative long-term trend and the Great Recession. However, the Recession's far-reaching consequences were not equally felt. The foreign-born fared the worst, men worse than women, and non-youth worse than youth (eighteen to twenty-four). Declining income and rising unemployment best explain the effects. People reported no change in happiness from the Great Recession when excluding the effects of declining income. This analysis is based on data from the General Social Survey (1972 to 2014). Micro-economic regressions, including macro controls, are used to estimate group-specific trends and deviations from trend occurring in 2008 and 2010. Fixed-effects analysis also supports the main conclusions.
SSRN Electronic Journal
Previous evidence indicates that trust is an important correlate of compliance with Covid-19 cont... more Previous evidence indicates that trust is an important correlate of compliance with Covid-19 containment policies. However, this conclusion hinges on two crucial assumptions: first, that compliance does not change over time, and second, that mobility and self-reported measures are good proxies for compliance. We demonstrate that compliance changes over the period March 2020 to January 2021, in ten mostly European countries, and that increasing (decreasing) trust in others predicts increasing (decreasing) compliance. We develop the first time-varying measure of compliance, which is calculated as the association between containment policies and people's mobility behavior using data from Oxford Policy Tracker and Google. We also develop new measures of both trust in others and national institutions by applying sentiment analysis to Twitter data. We test the predictive role of trust using a variety of dynamic panel regression techniques. This evidence indicates compliance should not be taken for granted and confirms the importance of cultivating social trust.
SSRN Electronic Journal
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
Oxford Economic Papers
Whether economic growth improves the human lot is a matter of conditions. We focus on Japan, a co... more Whether economic growth improves the human lot is a matter of conditions. We focus on Japan, a country which shifted in the 1990s from a pattern of rampant economic growth and stagnant well-being, to one of modest growth and increasing well-being. We discuss concurrent policy reforms and analyse the changes in well-being. In particular, we assess whether the correlates of the increase in well-being are consistent with those expected from the reforms. We apply Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to World Values Survey data. Results show that improved conditions for the elderly, parents and women, that is the primary groups targeted by the reforms, correlate with well-being increases. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that social safety nets can make economic growth compatible with sustained increases in well-being.
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Papers by Kelsey O'Connor