1 Jobless, Friendless, and Broke: What Happens to Different Areas of Life Before and After Unemployment?

Using a nationally-representative longitudinal data of the British people, this paper explores how different areas of a person‟s life evolved before and after unemployment. There is evidence that unemployment is preceded, on average, by a year of dissatisfaction with one‟s finance and job for both genders. Once entered unemployment, men and women reported a significant and persistent drop in the satisfaction with one‟s finance and social life, which perhaps explains why there is little overall hedonic adaptation to unemployment. Finally, this paper proposes a two-layer model to study leads and lags in life satisfaction to changes in employment statuses