Chapter 4of unemployment over a longish spell of years. As we have
seen, the BCS give us data on a person’s complete unem-
ployment history up to the age of 30. So in Table 4.5 the
dependent variable is the percentage of that time the per-
son spent unemployed— in other words their average un-
employment rate. For ease of exposition, we measure it this
time as a percentage (rather than a proportion).
In Table 4.5, column (1) we give the β- coefficients. As this
shows, the biggest single determinant of your unemploy-
ment rate is your father’s unemployment rate. (The effect is
measured here with childhood outcomes held constant, but
this has little effect on the impact of the family variables.)
So, turning to column (2), if your father’s unemployment
rate averaged 10%, your own unemployment rate will av-
erage 0.6% points higher than if your father was never un-
employed. The rate of intergenerational transmission (mea-
sured by the β- coefficient of 0.09) is thus only modest.^17
Quality of Work
But do people enjoy their work? Only recently has social
science shown how little most people do in fact enjoy
their work, compared with many other activities. This has
been discovered through time- use studies pioneered by,
among others, the Nobel Prize– winning psychologist Dan-
iel Kahneman. Table 4.6 shows the results of his team’s first
time- use study,^18 of around nine hundred women in Texas.
They were asked to divide the previous working day into epi -
sodes, like a film: typically they identified about fourteen
episodes. They then reported what they were doing in each
episode and who they were doing it with. They were also