| Unemployment not only affects the physical and mental health of individuals,but also affects the stable and sustainable development of society.2020 is a critical time point for building a well-off society in an all-round way.It is especially important to study the relationship between unemployment and personal well-being and depression.The subjective attitudes of the unemployed to a series of social issues have also become the basis for the government to formulate employment policies.Existing research is mainly concentrated in developed countries such as Europe and the United States.Research on employment and unemployment in the new normal and new era of China in the 21 st century is currently relatively rare.Based on the data of CFPS,this paper empirically studies the negative effects of unemployment on personal well-being and depression of non-agricultural employment groups by using the rich personal characteristic information and personal subjective attitude.First,the article refers to Akee&Zhao et al.(2019)to standardize the dependent variables,and then uses the OLS model without intercept terms to perform regression analysis on the data.According to the characteristics of subjective attitude variables such as well-being,this paper also uses logit and probit models,Order Logit and Order Probit models for regression,and compares it with OLS model estimates.Secondly,considering the missing variables and two-way causality problems in the model,this paper uses IV to solve the biased estimation problem caused by unemployment affecting personal well-being and depression by looking for the district and county unemployment rate as a tool variable.This paper also uses the propensity score matching method to solve the problem of sample selection bias to ensure the robustness and reliability of the model estimation.In addition,we conducted a sub-sample regression on the data by gender and household registration,and used the sub-sample regression to study the heterogeneity of unemployment effects in different groups.Third,from the perspectives of individual self-identity,social interaction and social trust,this paper studies the transmission mechanism of unemployment affecting individual happiness and depression.The mechanism analysis shows the ways and mediation effects of unemployment affecting individual happiness and depression.Fourth,this article studies the subjective attitudes of the unemployed to a series of social issues,and provides a reference for the government to maintain social stability and formulate corresponding employment policies.This study found that unemployment significantly reduces the happiness of non-agricultural employment groups and increases individual depression(that is,a negative measure of happiness).In terms of mechanism design,we have confirmed that unemployment will reduce an individual ’s social status,reduce his social interaction,and reduce his trust in society and the government,resulting in a decline in happiness and an increase in depression.Sub-sample regression analysis of gender and household registration,we found that unemployment has a more serious negative impact on female groups and groups holding agricultural hukou.In a series of subjective attitudes and evaluations of social issues,we found that the unemployed group pays particular attention to employment issues and believes that employment and unemployment are serious problems in society,while other problems such as education,housing,environment and government integrity have not been paid much attention.In order to maintain social stability,the government should continue to ensure employment priority policies,pay attention to mass unemployment,improve public opinion guidance mechanisms,and stabilize the masses ’employment expectations. |
