Does Low Job Satisfaction Lead to Job Mobility?

Nicolai Kristensen and Niels Westergård-Nielsen ()

No 1026, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse the role of job satisfaction and actual job change behaviour. The analysis is based on the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) data for Danish families 1994-2000. The results show that inclusion of job satisfaction, which is a subjective measure, does improve the ability to predict actual quit behaviour: Low overall job satisfaction significantly increases the probability of quit. Various job satisfaction domains are ranked according to their ability to predict quits. Satisfaction with Type of Work is found to be the most important job characteristic while satisfaction with Job Security is found to be insignificant. These results hold across age, gender and education sub-groups and are opposed to results for UK, where job security is found to be the most important job domain. This discrepancy between UK and Denmark might be due to differences in unemployment insurance benefits and indicates that there are “invisible” benefits inherited in the welfare state insurance system because employees in Denmark don’t worry about job security.

Keywords: quits; personnel economics; job satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J28 J30 J60 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2004-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Published - published as 'Job satisfaction and quits – Which job characteristics matters most?' in: Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift / Danish Economic Journal, 2006, 144 (2), 230-248

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1026.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp1026

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().