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How good or bad is a particular job? How good or bad is my own job? These are questions that everyone has asked or been asked. They are important questions, because they go to the heart of the issues of job quality and personal welfare.
One direct way to evaluate the extent to which jobs are good or bad is to rely on the opinions of workers by asking them about their own job satisfaction. Understanding job quality is indeed important for several reasons. First, careful evaluation of labour market policies requires that account be taken of their effects on all aspects of employment, not merely wages and employment levels. In this respect, the value of job satisfaction data stems from the existence of subjective, but important, aspects of the employment relationship, coupled with the near impossibility of measuring all the objective characteristics of a job. And even if measurement difficulties could be overcome, measurements of each characteristic would then need to be combined in order to create what economists call a utility index. In constructing such an index, job satisfaction data allow the job incumbent's personal values to be used instead of those of the policy-maker or researcher. In short, no simple, externally imposed taxonomy of "good jobs" and "bad jobs" is likely to capture what is obvious to labour market participants about their own jobs.
Second, although a number of large-scale surveys have included questions about job satisfaction,1 there has been relatively little systematic exploration of cross-sectional variation in job satisfaction within large socio-economic groups (as distinct from employees of a specific organization or group of organizations).2 As a result, the meaning of high, low, or changing levels of job satisfaction in larger socio-economic groups is not yet well understood. Not only has existing research in this field focused predominantly on industrialized economies, but none of it has tried to determine how relationships between job satisfaction and its covariates compare across dissimilar national labour markets.
Third, job satisfaction has been shown to be an important predictor of quits and other objective outcomes (Freeman, 1978; Akerlof and Dickens, 1982; Akerlof, Rose and Yellen, 1988; Clark, 2001). In this respect, job satisfaction can be viewed as an important organizational indicator. Seashore (1974) and Clark (1998)...