How’s the job? Well-being and social capital in the workplace

The authors first investigate how income an d job characteristics affect life satisfaction, then estimate compensating differentials for non-financialjob characteristics. To address potential problems with using life satisfaction data as dependent variables, they draw on three Canadian surveys (conducted in the years 2002-2003) with different samples and questions, and they use individual personality measures, various robustness checks, and cross-testing with measures of domain satisfaction. The life satisfaction results how strikingly large values for non-financialjob characteristics, e pecially workplace trust. For example, a one-third-standard-deviation increase in trust in management is equivalent to an income increase of more than one-third. These results, if confirmed by further research in other settings, uggest either that it is very costly to build and maintain workplace trust or that there are opportunities to improve workplace environments so as to increase both life satisfaction a d workplace fficiency. A dam Smith ( 1 850, Book 1, Chap. 1 0, Pt. 1) ** * argued that in the absence of policy or other impediments to mobility, wages would tend to adjust so as to be the same for all jobs of equivalent characteristics, so that wage differences would reflect he relative attractiveness ofdifferent kinds of employ-ment. Smith's first factor- the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the job- underlies subsequent research attempting to establish the value of life (Viscusi 1993) and to assess the value of different job characteristics, mainly those that are disagreeable rather than agreeable in nature. Valuing non-financialjob characteristics is also our main focus in this paper. Our methodology, however, differ