The well-being gap between the employed and the unemployed. Re-examination of the stigma hypothesis

The stigma hypothesis explains the lower well-being cost of own unemployment in high-unemployment regions results by referring to the notion of social norm. In high-unemployment regions the norm of working is supposed to be weaker. This paper re-examines this hypothesis by referring to work values, as declared by the respondents in the last edition of European Values Study. The analysis for 42 countries shows that in societies where the declared value of work is stronger the unemployed experience overall smaller (and not, as predicted by the stigma hypothesis, larger) wellbeing loss compared to employed persons. My results shed a new light on the relationship between the regional unemployment rate and value of employment specific for this region.