The Changing Distribution of Job Satisfaction

By Daniel S. Hamermesh. Social Science Research Network, 2001

489 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the United States between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower quantiles. An identical phenomenon is observed among men in West Germany in response to a sharp increase in the relative earnings of high-wage men in the mid-1990s. Several hypotheses about the determinants of satisfaction are presented and examined using both cross-section data on these cohorts and panel data from the NLSY and the German SOEP. The evidence is most consistent with workers regret about the returns to their investment in skills affecting their satisfaction. Job satisfaction is especially responsive to surprises in the returns to observable skills, less so to surprises in the returns to unobservables; and the effects of earnings shocks on job satisfaction dissipate over time.

Subfields: Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a89ad5715250534c8864cce711e8dcf048d8f090

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In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Individual Well-Being in a Dynamic Perspective (2012, unknown): “As an approximation, however, we make use of a fixed-effects regression model, assuming linearity (see also Hamermesh, 2001, Schwarze and Haerpfner, 2003, and Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters, 2004).”
Can the Large Swings in Russian Life Satisfaction be Explained by Ups and Downs in Real Incomes (2006, unknown): “In comparison, the loss of data in applications with the Chamberlain method is usually close to 50 percent (see, for example, Winkelmann and Winkelmann, 1998; Hamermesh, 2001; Clark et al., 2001; Clark, 2003).”
The Impact of Pay and Promotion on Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Higher Education Institutes of Pakistan (2012, background): “Job satisfaction level is less for employees, who receive less amount of pay whereas higher amount receiving employees have high level of satisfaction[13].”
Job satisfaction as an indicator of the quality of work (2005, unknown): “It is important to point out that, in order 2 According to Hamermesh (1999), job satisfaction would respond to changes in salary distribution rather than their absolute levels of inequality, and this only in the short term, in which case, and given the generalized increase in market inequality…”
Relative pay and job satisfaction: some new evidence (2003, unknown): “…on human happiness in general and job satisfaction in particular. such as gender (Clark 1997, Galdeano 2001), own wage or income, relative wages (Clark and Oswald 1996, Hamermesh 1977, 2001), union activity (Borjas 1977), and mismatches between education and skill (Allen and van der Velden 2001).”
Participation in continuous, on-the-job training and the impact on job satisfaction: longitudinal evidence from the German labour market (2007, unknown): “6 24 J ‘has chiefly been the domain of social psychologists’ (Hammermesh, 1999: 1), economists, while usually lamenting subjective measurements as being too noisy to be of analytical value, have nevertheless admitted job satisfaction into the economic realm because of its impact on economic…”
An analysis of the determinants of job satisfaction when individuals’ baseline satisfaction levels may differ (2007, unknown): “The same approach is adopted by Hamermesh (2001).”
Job Mismatches and Labour Market Outcomes: Panel Evidence on University Graduates* (2013, unknown): “Similar data conversions are common in the literature (e.g. Winkelman and Winkelman 1998, Hamermesh 2001).”
Reported Subjective Well-Being: A Challenge for Economic Theory and Economic Policy (2003, unknown): “…Lucas et al. (2003) and Stutzer and Frey (2003a) on marriage, Saris (2001) and Schyns (2000) on income, Stutzer and Frey (2003b) on commuting and Hamermesh (2001) and Frey and Benz (2002) analyzing job satisfaction, and van Praag et al. (2003) a wider set of domain satisfaction measures.”
Well-being, job satisfaction and labour mobility (2010, background): “The strategy is first to test for each well-being 1 Hamermesh (2001), for example, concludes: “even though it may be a substantial stretch to link expressed job satisfaction (or satisfaction generally) to utility, studying job satisfaction is still important for understanding labor-market behavior…”
Job satisfaction in Britain: individual and job related factors (2006, unknown): “Job satisfaction has been investigated in several disciplines such as psychology (Argyle, 1989), sociology (Hodson, 1985; Kalleberg and Loscocco, 1983), economics (Hamermesh, 1977, 2001; Freeman, 1978), and management sciences (Hunt and Saul, 1975).”
Are People Inequality Averse, and Do They Prefer Redistribution by the State? Evidence from German Longitudinal Data on Life Satisfaction (2007, unknown): “Hamermesh (2001) and DiTella et al. (2001) also used ordinary least squares (OLS) to analyze satisfaction scales.”
Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself? (2007, unknown): “While the ranking information would require ordered probit or logit models, comparative analyses have shown that it makes virtually no difference whether responses are treated cardinally or ordinally in happiness functions (Di Telia et al. 2001; Hamermesh 2001).”