رضایت تضمین شده؟ رضایت از زندگی، عوامل سازمانی و خود اشتغالی Satisfaction guaranteed? Life satisfaction, institutional factors, and self-employment

1. Introduction The relationship between entrepreneurship and life satisfaction, which is a key component to individual well-being (Pavot et al., 1991), has become a topic of increasing scholarly interest (Coad and Binder, 2014). Based on the hedonic perspective of well-being (Ryan and Deci, 2001), well-being consists primarily of subjective happiness, and individual perceptions of subjective well-being are comprised of the presence of positive affect, the absence of negative affect, and overall life satisfaction (Diener et al., 1999). To that end, a substantial amount of literature has been devoted to the relationship between life satisfaction, as a component of subjective well-being, and self-employment. While there has been some evidence suggesting that self-employment can have detrimental effects on life satisfaction, primarily as a result of the increased level of work-family conflict that individuals who are self-employed experience (Ford et al., 2007; Parasuraman and Simmers, 2001), evidence generally supports the notion that individuals who engage in self-employment realize benefits with regards to their life satisfaction (Kolvereid, 1996). Evidence suggests that individuals who are self-employed experience higher levels of job satisfaction and that self-employment is positively correlated with life satisfaction as well (Andersson, 2008). Furthermore, recent research has shown that individuals who move from occupational employment to selfemployment experience an increase in life satisfaction as a result of the transition (Binder and Coad, 2013, 2016), and that entrepreneurial success can also result in an increase in life satisfaction (Przepiorka, 2017). Finally, individuals who decide to pursue self-employment and entrepreneurial endeavors later in life have been shown to have substantially higher life satisfaction than those who are occupationally employed (Kautonen et al., 2017). However, although an impressive body of research has examined the relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction from the perspective of the individual, there remains a relative paucity of research regarding how broader, institutional factors (e.g. political and legal structures) might influence this relationship. Although a variety of institutional factors could influence life satisfaction we focus on the two—a proxy for improvement in income inequality [shared prosperity] and challenges to business activities [business freedom]. The choice of these two moderators is based on extant literature on income inequality, economic freedom, and life satisfaction, which suggests that self-employed individuals in contexts where shared prosperity is increasing and business freedom is greater may report a higher life satisfaction (Graafland and Lous, 2017; Hall and Lawson, 2014; Kešeljević, 2016). To test our theoretical questions, we examine a multi-country sample from the European Social Survey Round 7 (2014), merged with World Bank Indicators 2014 data (for the measure of shared prosperity) and Heritage Foundation 2014 data (for the measure of business freedom). Based upon our analysis we find that self-employed individuals report higher life satisfaction. Moreover, the relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction is stronger for individuals in countries with higher shared prosperity. Additionally, we find evidence to support a three-way interaction wherein greater business freedom enhances the moderating influence of shared prosperity on the relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction.