4.2. Non-wage characteristics and job satisfaction We require information on the non-wage characteristics of a job which is not influenced by the wage.12 This excludes comprehensive evaluations of job quality such as “How satisfied are you with your job?”.
We focus on “job satisfaction for work in itself” as a measure for workers' appreciation of the non-wage aspects of a job. There are other questions relating to satisfaction with hours and job security (see Table (1)), these dimensions of non-wage characteristics are less obvious to interpret however: the concept “job satisfaction with hours” is most obviously understood as an indicator of the distance between desired hours and actual hours — both of which may be affected by the wealth shock.Whilst job security is arguably a non-wage characteristic, our method is rather inappropriate to evaluate the MWP for job security. Individuals leaving workplaces with low job security may be a sign of imminent involuntary job loss and not revealed preference for job security. Job satisfaction with work in itself appears a good summary measure of the quality of fixed non-wage aspects specific to a job. In what follows,we thus refer to “job satisfaction for work in itself” simply as “job satisfaction”.
Reported job satisfaction may include an important subjective component — the same job may be viewed as satisfying by one person and not by another. This is acceptable as long as the subjective element is uncorrelated with wealth shocks and other covariates. We can then rephrase our research question as follows: “How does the influence of selfreported
job satisfaction on job choice change over different wealth levels?”