Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the non-pecuniary life satisfaction … makes people generally better off than being unemployed, but employed welfare recipients do not reach the life satisfaction …

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 … including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the …

self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more … that unemployment affects life satisfaction and experienced utility differently may be explained by the fact that people do …, triggered by the opportunity to use the time in a way that yields higher levels of satisfaction than working …

We use the differences between life satisfaction and emotional well-being of employed and unemployed persons to analyze …