The Changing Distribution of Job Satisfaction

Daniel Hamermesh

Journal of Human Resources, 2001, vol. 36, issue 1, 1-30

Abstract: 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 quartiles rose relative to that of workers in the lowest quartile. 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' job satisfaction being especially responsive to surprises in the returns to observable skills, less so to surprises in the returns to unobservables. The effects of earnings shocks on job satisfaction dissipate over time.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (212)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3069668
A subscription is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Changing Distribution of Job Satisfaction (1999)
Working Paper: The Changing Distribution of Job Satisfaction (1999)
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:uwp:jhriss:v:36:y:2001:i:1:p:1-30

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Human Resources from University of Wisconsin Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().