Álvarez Espiño, MarcosFernández López, SaraRey-Ares, Lucía2024-03-112024-03-112023Álvarez-Espiño, M., Fernández-López, S. & Rey-Ares, L. Job expectations and financial fragility: evidence from pre-COVID Spain. Empir Econ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-023-02499-30377-7332http://hdl.handle.net/10347/33115Previous research has related household financial fragility (FF) and the employment status of the household members by focusing only on the labour income channel. In contrast, the literature has scarcely addressed the study of this relationship from a psychological perspective that could be related to the theory of bounded rationality. This article aims to analyse how job expectations relate to the level of household FF. Using a sample of 8554 Spanish individuals in the period 2016–2017, we construct a multidimensional index of household FF. The results indicate that households with unemployed, self-employed, or part-time workers have higher levels of FF, but the job expectations of the household and the individual play an even more important role in the level of the FF. These findings suggest that the perception of labour market uncertainty may influence the level of household FF to a greater extent than the objective employment situations of the individuals.engThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Atribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Employment statusFinancial fragilityJob expectationsPart-time employmentSelf-employmentUnemploymentjournal article10.1007/s00181-023-02499-31435-8921open access