The health and wellbeing effects of commuting: evidence from exogenous shocks

Presenter: Luke A. Munford, University of Manchester

Author: Luke A. Munford

Co-author(s): Nigel Rice and Jennifer Roberts

Commuting time (CT) places a non-trivial constraint on the time use of workers. Recently, average CT has risen in many developed countries and it is recognised that the burden of commuting is potentially detrimental to mental health and well-being (H&WB). We investigate the impact of CT on such outcomes using data from Understanding Society. These data contain detailed longitudinal information on labour market attachment, job tenure, CT, and measures of H&WB. Our identification strategy exploits the panel dimension of the data by considering individuals who report no change in either household location or employer or job role, but do report a non-trivial change in CT. We assume that such individuals change the location, but not the nature, of employment. This allows identification of the impact of CT on H&WB by abstracting from the effects of potential compensating characteristics arising from changes in labour supply or housing relocation. Further, we condition on characteristics known to influence H&WB including income, education, marital status and household composition. Fixed-effects specifications allow us to control for individual unobserved time-invariant preferences. Our results suggest increased CT reduces wellbeing and objective measures of health for females, but has no impact on men. While we identify statistically significant decreases in wellbeing for women, the magnitude is modest; a 10 minute increase in commuting reduces wellbeing by around 0.07 (on a 1-36 scale). Whilst our identification strategy enables stronger identification of the causal effects of commuting than previous studies, the magnitudes we find are comparable to those reported elsewhere.