It is well documented that the self-employed experience higher levels of happiness than waged employees even when their incomes are lower. Given the UK government’s asymmetric treatment of waged workers and the self-employed, we use a unique Covid-19 period data set which covers the months leading up to the March lockdown and the months just after to assess three aspects of the Covid-19 crisis on the self-employed: hours of work reductions, the associated income reductions and the effects of both on subjective well-being. Our findings show the large and disproportionate reductions in hours and income for the self-employed directly contributed to a deterioration in their levels of subjective well-being compared to waged workers. It appears that their resilience was broken when faced with the reality of dealing with rare events, particularly when the UK welfare support response was asymmetric and favouring waged employees.

有据可查的是，即使自己的收入较低，自雇者也比有薪雇员享有更高的幸福感。鉴于英国政府对付薪工人和个体经营者的不对称待遇，我们使用了独特的Covid-19时期数据集，该数据集涵盖了3月锁定前的几个月以及紧随其后的几个月，以评估Covid-19危机的三个方面关于自雇人士的信息：减少工作时间，相关的收入减少以及两者对主观幸福感的影响。我们的研究结果表明，与有薪工人相比，自雇者的工时和收入大幅减少且成比例减少，直接导致其主观幸福感下降。面对面对罕见事件的现实，他们的弹性似乎遭到破坏，