Clark, A. E. (2003). Unemployment as a social norm: Psychological evidence from panel data. Journal of labor economics, 21(2), 323-351.
This article uses seven waves of panel data to test for social norms in labor market status. The unemployed's well‐being is shown to be strongly positively correlated with reference group unemployment (at the regional, partner, or household level). This result, far stronger for men, is robust to controls for unobserved individual heterogeneity. Panel data also show that those whose well‐being fell the most on entering ...