Volume 36, Number 1 (Winter) 2001
Hammermesh, Daniel S.. 2001. "The Changing Distribution of Job Satisfaction." Journal of Human Resources 36(1): 30.
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 quarterlies 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 inn 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.
In the end, economics is not about wealth - it's about the pursuit of happiness (Krugman 1998)
Daniel S. Hammermesh is the Edward Everett Hale Centennial professor of economics, University of Texas at Austin, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and research fellow, Insitut für die Zukunft der Arbeit. I thank Andrew Clark, Li Gan, Jennifer Hunt, Viktor Steiner, the Coeditor and referees, and participants in seminars at the NBER and several universities for helpful suggestions. David Trybula rendered extremely careful and energetic research assistance, and the Russell Sage Foundation provided support under grant 85-97-03. The data in this article are available from the author from June 2001 through May 2004.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X