In this paper we try to understand the determinants of job satisfaction. The population of US Ph.D. graduates provides a useful homogeneity - same level of education - and an interesting heterogeneity - different career outcomes, academics vs. non academics. Empirically we use the Survey of...

This paper investigates the ease with which recent immigrants to Australia from different countries and with different visa categories enter employment at an appropriate level to their prior education and experience in the source country. Unlike most of the earlier research in this field that...

We use two datasets for urban China to examine whether an increase in reference group income lowers or increases job satisfaction. The former is consistent with a status effect ??? an increase in the income of others lowers my satisfaction because I feel jealous. The latter is consistent with a...

Individual preferences concerning retirement age are strongly differentiated both within and between countries. According to the Share survey, the proportion of workers aged from 50 to 65 who wished to retire as soon as possible in 2004 ranged from 31% in the Netherlands to 67% in Spain. Such a...

According to Sen’s capability approach, objective working conditions can be seen as functionings (i.e. things experienced by the individuals). The corresponding capability set includes all sets of alternatives working conditions existing in the society for a given kind of job. Observing the...

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers...

We test the simple wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985-1993). We develop a new methodology to extract a consistent estimate of how the expected present value of one's job (including the non-pecuniary component) compares with outside...

By reporting his satisfaction with his job or any other experience, an individual does not communicate the number of utils that he feels. Instead, he expresses his posterior preference over available alternatives conditional on acquired knowledge of the past. This new interpretation of reported...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being...