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| THE IMPACT OF COMMUTING TIME ON SUBJECTIVE HAPPINESS: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA FAMILY PANEL SURVEY DATA |
| WU Jiang-jie1,2, SUN Bin-dong1,2 |
1. Center for Modern Chinese City Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China;
2. School of Urban and Regional Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China |
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Abstract People pay more and more attention to happiness research in modern life. The happiness is the goal not only for individual but also for city authority. Over the past decades, much of the research concerning happiness was about the relationship between happiness and social factors, such as income inequality, pubic investment, air pollution and so on. There are some possible reasons that can explain why commuting time is associated with subjective happiness. Firstly, with the increase of commuting cost, people will have lower disposable personal income so that there will be a decrease in their subjective happiness. Secondly, if people spend more time on commuting, it means that he will lack time to do other things, like social contact and sports. This will do harm to their body and mental health. Last but not the least, commuting time can affect job searching and working performance. Based on CFPS data, we use an ordered logit regression model to investigate the effect of commuting time on individual's happiness. We take the subjective happiness as dependent variable which is based on the question ‘how happy are you with your life, all things considered?’. The key explanatory variable is commuting time derived from the question ‘how much time do you spend in the way from home to work?’. In order to explore the robustness of the effect of commuting time, we put the explanatory variables into the model step by step. We find that commuting time has an important detrimental effect on individual's subjective happiness. People with longer commuting time have lower subjective happiness. The result is robust with regard to life satisfaction.
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Received: 05 June 2015
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2016, Vol. 31 
