WORKING PAPERS

Inexpensive wages and a high-stress environment may lead to a prevalence of loneliness among workers in Japan. In contrast, the changing working conditions and socioeconomic factors during the pandemic may contribute to post-pandemic loneliness. As a result, we studied associations between loneliness and various types of work and employment status among workers in Japan while also considering the timeline of the pandemic. Utilising Hiroshima University’s annual panel survey, we also tracked workers’ movement in the labour market from February 2020, before the reclassification of the spread of COVID-19 from an epidemic to a pandemic, until February 2022, almost two years after the pandemic.