Happier at Work? The Impact of Working at an Employee-Owned Firm and Working from Home on Job Satisfaction

Richard Freeman and Huanan Xu

No 34231, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of working for an ESOP firm and Working-From-Home (WFH) on job satisfaction in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and the General Social Science (GSS) survey. It finds that job satisfaction is higher for employees in ESOPs than for observationally similar workers in non-ESOP firms and for WFH workers than for their non-WFH peers. Fixed effect analysis of the NLSY97 finds that both ESOP and WFH employment raise job satisfaction for the same worker when he/she changes work status. The channels through which the two conditions raise satisfaction appear to differ: ESOPs raise satisfaction by increasing worker participation on collective workplace or firm decisions while WFH raise satisfaction by increasing worker flexibility in their individual work activity. Both participation and flexibility also raise job satisfaction independently. The data further show ESOPs had more extensive WFH than non-ESOP firms during the Covid-19 pandemic.

JEL-codes: J28 J54 J81 M54 P1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lab
Note: IO LS POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34231.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34231

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34231
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().