How Satisfied are the Self-Employed? A Life Domain View

Abstract

It is well-known in the literature that self-employment positively influences job satisfaction, but the e↵ects on other life domains and overall life satisfaction are much less clear. Our study analyzes the welfare e↵ects of self-employment apart from its monetary aspects, and focuses on the overall life satisfaction as well as di↵erent domain satisfactions of self-employed individuals in our German sample from 1997 to 2010. Using matching estimators to create an appropriate control group and di↵erentiating between di↵erent types of self-employment, we find that voluntary self-employment brings with it positive benefits apart from work satisfaction, and leads to higher overall life satisfaction as well as increased health satisfaction, all of which increase in the first three years of self-employment. Being forced into selfemployment to escape unemployment, however, confers no such benefits. Additionally, both types of self-employment lead to increasing dissatisfaction with one's leisure time.

The Life Partner and the Life Satisfaction of the Entrepreneur

“…However, we extend extant literature by providing evidence for the self-employed (with and without employees) by comparing them to wage earners. The effect on the self-employed with employees is the smallest probably because having more employees to rely on can be comforting for the entrepreneur and increases their autonomy (Binder & Coad, 2016;Binder & Coad, 2014) Additionally, our results show that despite the presence of conflicts between the life partners, which bares negative effects of the life satisfaction of both the entrepreneurs and wage earners, the effect of the presence of a life partner is still positive. This is probably because a life partner can be a source of financial, material and emotional support (Simoes et al, 2016).…”

“…Entrepreneurs and their life partners share life goals and care for each other in different ways than with other family members (Brannon et al, 2013). And while entrepreneurship research focused on the role of the life partner in the venture, other roles are underexplored such as the wellbeing of the entrepreneur (Binder & Coad, 2016). In this paper, we attempt to answer the question: do life-partners increase entrepreneurs' life satisfaction?…”

“…A study using a European sample shows that the self-employed with employees have higher degrees (Dvouletý, 2018;Millán et al, 2014), more work experience, are more likely to have working life partners (Dvouletý, 2018). Employees are resources taking a share work, which enables the self-employed to benefit from higher levels of autonomy (Binder & Coad, 2016;Coad & Binder, 2014). Employees can be compared to colleagues at work and both can bring benefits.…”

“…It is noteworthy though, that work seems central to the lives of entrepreneurs (Loewe et al, 2015). There is strong evidence that entrepreneurs are more satisfied with their work when compared to employed individuals (Blanchflower, 2004;Blanchflower et al, 2001;Blanchflower & Oswald, 1998;Millán et al, 2013;Van der Zwan et al, 2018); yet, drivers of the life satisfaction of entrepreneurs remain less clear (Dolan et al, 2008;Binder & Coad, 2016). Entrepreneurship, as a work type, can presents a trade-off (Stephan, 2018).…”

Happy Free Willies? Investigating the relationship between freelancing and subjective well-being

“…2 The third contribution is that we perform a joint analysis of satisfaction levels with several domains in life including work, leisure, income, and health (the domain satisfactions). In other words, we apply a "life domain view" (Binder and Coad 2016) in that we acknowledge that satisfaction with life is a function of satisfaction with a range of domains in life (Erdogan et al 2012). Hence, disentangling these domains may provide useful information on well-being outcomes across (self-employed) workers.…”