Abstract
Commuting time shapes workers’ daily lives and job opportunities for job seekers. Recent policy debates in the context of the German welfare system included the proposal to tighten requirements regarding commuting time subject to the threat of benefit reductions. While commuting imposes time costs, monetary costs, and stress, these burdens are unevenly distributed across social groups, particularly by gender, parenthood, and income. Existing evidence suggests that women are less willing than men to accept long commutes, which may contribute to persistent gender wage differences; however, prior work has not examined whether the disutility of commuting increases non-linearly with commute time.
This project estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid additional commuting time and tests whether WTP exhibits convexity (i.e., over-proportional increases in disutility at higher baseline commute durations). To this end, we implement a vignette-based stated-choice survey experiment within the IAB-OPAL survey (https://www.iab-opal.de), the IAB’s high-frequency online panel “Arbeiten und Leben in Deutschland”. IAB-OPAL repeatedly surveys the German working-age population several times per year and can field topical modules quickly. Using IAB-OPAL, we target two groups: unemployed job seekers, mainly those who receive welfare benefits, and employed individuals. Respondents repeatedly choose between hypothetical job offers that trade off net income and commuting time (and the additional job attributes contract type and mobility support). We estimate preference parameters using conditional logit models, derive WTP for reduced commuting, and compare alternative model specifications to detect non-linearities.