1. 1 Workplace job satisfaction: a multilevel analysis WERS 2004 Users Group Meeting, NIESR March 16, 2007

2. 2 Outline of presentation  Introduction  Data  Methodology  Results  Summary of findings  Further work

3. 3 Introduction  Job satisfaction as a theme of research in economics  The link between JS and economic outcomes  Determinants of JS: The evidence thus far  Should we explore JS and its determinants further?  How is this study different, is it?

4. 4 Data  The data used is WERS 2004  The most comprehensive of the WERS series of surveys  Nationally representative survey of British workplaces  Use is made of data from the management and employee surveys  SEQ: 22,451 (61% response rate)  MQ: 2,295 workplaces (64% response)

5. 5 Data (cont’d)  Eight different facets of JS have been monitored in wers2004  An ‘overall’ JS indicator has also been generated  Each of the five scale JS indicators have been collapsed into a dummy (1 if ‘very satisfied’ or ‘satisfied’ & 0 otherwise  A range of exogenous variables (employee & establishment) has been used

6. 6 Data (Descriptive stat)

7. 7 Data (corr. Matrix)

8. 8 Methodology  The methodology employed exploits the data structure  No account has been made for possible endogeneity problems yet  Accounts for unobserved heterogeneity, unlike most in the literature  This version, focuses on unmeasured heterogeneity in overall response

9. 9 Methodology (cont’d)  Following Hammermesh (1977) & Freeman (1978), utility from work or aspects of work is given as  This is modelled using the basic 2-level ML model that is specified as

10. 10 Methodology (cont’d)  Unobserved heterogeneity component is modelled as  so that  We’ve binary JS indicators » need for a link function given by  with

11. 11 Results  Please see results in the handout!

12. 12 Summary of results  That firm-level unobserved heterogeneity is important for the most part  Important/significant employee & employer effects, particularly availability of training opportunity (+) Union membership (-) Flexible work arrangement (+) Skills mismatch (-) Industry of employment (education (+), health (+))

13. 13 Further work  Refining/reducing the correlates  Investigate whether different results if using the ordinal indicators of satisfaction  Introducing higher levels (‘astatus’ for eg)  Random coefficient models  Account for possible endogeneity ~~~~