Comparative well-being of the self-employed and paid employees in the USA

Drawing upon the job demand-control model and analyzing more than 600,000 responses from the nationally representative Gallup survey data over the 2010–2016 period, we find that self-employed individuals in the USA report lower life satisfaction than paid employees (i.e., evaluative well-being). The self-employed also experience both positive feelings such as happiness and enjoyment and negative feelings such as anger and stress more than their wage-earning peers, leading to a stark emotional dichotomy in how they experience their daily lives (i.e., hedonic well-being) consistent with both high job control and high job demand that are prevalent in self-employment. Lastly, the self-employed also report more health problems and lower physical well-being. Income (and low local unemployment to some extent) successfully mitigates the negative effects of self-employment on subjective well-being while enhancing the positive, but education does not do so. Overall, the results suggest that self-employment is associated with predominantly negative well-being effects in the USA.