16 January 2019

Research pick: Unemployment and unhappiness - "The analysis of unemployment, happiness and demographic factors using log-linear models"

A new research paper in the International Journal of Economics and Business Research uses log-linear models to study the correlation between happiness, employment and various demographic factors.

Sultan Kuzu of the Department of Quantitative Methods, in the School of Business, at Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey together with Sevgi Elmas-Atay and Merve Gerçek of the Department of Human Resources Management there, explain how unemployment is an important economic measurement. It is studied in the context of a nation’s development as well as in a sociological context. Importantly, it is known to be closely associated with welfare, quality of life and psychological health of individuals.

The team has now looked at unemployment not as an abstract, statistical concept in the macroeconomic arena but from the personal perspective based on “micro” level data acquired from household surveys carried out by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). Log-linear models were used to analyse the data and these showed clearly that employment is related to a person’s happiness and gender and that there is a statistically significant difference between happiness and gender in a developing country such as Turkey.

Kuzu, S., Elmas-Atay, S. and Gerçek, M. (2019) ‘The analysis of unemployment, happiness and demographic factors using log-linear models’, Int. J. Economics and Business Research, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp.87–105.

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