Economic Disruption, Life Satisfaction, and Political Attitudes

Talk by Ekaterina Travova (University of Copenhagen) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

This paper studies the long-run effects of personal experience of work-life disruption during the transition period on life satisfaction and political left-right orientation in the former communist CEE countries. Combining newly collected employment statistics by region and sector with data on individual work histories from SHARE, we construct an instrument that captures a potential exposure of a person to the country-wide sector-specific disruption shock. We find a significant long-lasting negative impact of transition disruption on current-day life satisfaction. One of the potential channels is psychological well-being. Furthermore, we document that a career disruption during the transition period shifts the political orientation to the right side of the left-right scale but only in East Germany.