Behavioral Economics for Leaders

CHAPTER 8Job Hunting and Patience

Long interruptions in employment make it harder to return to the labor market. It's important to find employment quickly again after you've lost a job. Is patience helpful here or more of an obstacle?

Joining the line of the unemployed in front of an employment office looking for work is an unpleasant, sobering experience. At the beginning of my academic career, the austerity packages of the Austrian federal government in the 1990s resulted in all vacancies at universities being blocked. I had to make two trips to the employment office. Luckily, I was unemployed for only a short while. Labor market statistics show that people with higher education find a new job more quickly, so extended periods of time without a job are less frequent. Surprisingly, a higher salary before being unemployed also helps in finding a job. It shows that a person looking for work has been employed in a responsible, maybe even high, position, so the person in question has experience and expertise. And these qualities are attractive to the labor market.

Some personal qualities can also help in getting back to work. One is patience or the ability to work toward a goal and persevere no matter what the effort might be. For a long time, labor market researchers were uncertain whether patience was a virtue when looking for a job.

Some theorized that patient people would have an advantage, since patience helps with the stress and hassle, even if it doesn't entail immediate ...