Determinants of Job Satisfaction in Young Russian Workers

A growing economic literature regards the analysis of job satisfaction; however, as for young people the investigations are still scarce. In this paper we analyse job satisfaction among Russian young workers by using the data collected for four items, the first of which concerns the general satisfaction about the job; the other three items concern specific aspects of job satisfaction with respect to work condition, earning, and opportunity for professional growth. The corresponding response variables are categorical with five ordered categories, from “absolutely unsatisfied” to “absolutely satisfied”. The longitudinal dataset also contains personal information about the respondents (gender, age, marital status, number of children, educational level, etc.). We estimate ordered logit models of job satisfaction with individual fixed effects for a panel data of Russian young workers, carrying out separate analyses for the general job satisfaction variable and three variables on specific aspects of job satisfaction. If wages adjusted to fully compensate workplace disamenities, we would expect that differences in job satisfaction across individuals would not be systematically related to wage differentials, ceteris paribus. But this is not the case for our panel: for all but one of the samples considered there is at least one job satisfaction variable with a significantly positive wage effect. We, therefore, interpret this result as a failure of the theory of compensating wage differentials in the Russian youth labour market. There is the interesting exception, though, that compensating wage differentials do seem at work among the older subjects in the panel. Our estimates also show strong gender and location effects.