Investigating the determinants of job satisfaction of Italian graduates: a model-based approach

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between personal, economic and time-dependent covariates as determinants of the job satisfaction expressed by graduate workers. After discussing the main results of the literature, the work emphasizes a statistical modelling approach able to effectively estimate and visualize those determinants and their interactions with subjects' covariates. Interpretation and visualization of graduates' profiles are shown on the basis of a survey conducted in Italy; more specifically, the determinants of both satisfaction and uncertainty of the respondents are explicitly discussed.

Keywords:

• job satisfaction
• ordinal data
• cub models

AMS Classification Codes:

• 62D05
• 62F

JEL Classification Codes:

• C13
• C25
• C52
• J28

Acknowledgements

Authors thank associate editor and two anonymous referees for constructive comments to a preliminary version of the paper. The research has been performed thanks to a cooperation agreement between the Inter-University Consortium AlmaLaurea, Bologna and Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was partially supported by FIRB2012 project at University of Perugia (code RBFR12SHVV) and by project SHAPE-Programme STAR (CUP E68C13000020003) at University of Naples Federico II, financially supported by UniNA and Compagnia di San Paolo.