Beyond Wages: Teleworkability, Job Match Quality, and Passion at Work
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This dissertation examines non-wage job attributes, providing insights into how they influence worker mobility, job choice, and overall job satisfaction. While traditional labor economics emphasizes wages as the primary determinant of employment decisions, recent developments highlight the increasing significance of non-monetary factors, such as flexible work arrangement and meaning, in shaping job outcomes.The first paper provides empirical evidence linking teleworkability, a job attribute significantly enhanced by recent technological advancements and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, to geographic mobility. It demonstrates how increased telework flexibility fundamentally changes worker migration decisions, offering insights into evolving urban dynamics and potential implications for regional economic disparities. The second paper discusses challenges in measuring job match quality, a crucial determinant of labor market efficiency. By empirically comparing various measures traditionally used to infer match quality, such as wages, job tenure, and subjective job satisfaction, it reveals discrepancies among these proxies, urging caution in their interpretation and suggesting the necessity of multidimensional assessments. The third paper innovatively incorporates workers' own voices to identify and quantify the non-wage factors they value most in their employment relationships. Leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques, it systematically analyzes workers' open-ended responses, uncovering rich qualitative insights that significantly enhance our understanding of intrinsic job satisfaction and dissatisfaction factors, such as flexibility, job tasks, interpersonal relationships, firm culture, and management quality. Together, these three papers provide a holistic perspective on how modern labor markets are shaped by a complex set of non-wage job attributes. Each paper addresses a distinct yet complementary dimension: teleworkability illustrates tangible job flexibility influencing geographical decisions; the job match quality study highlights measurement complexities; and the passion-at-work paper captures intrinsic workplace preferences directly from employees. Collectively, these studies underscore the critical role non-wage attributes play in defining modern job quality, enriching traditional economic analysis and providing deeper insights relevant for policymakers, organizations, and scholars interested in improving labor market outcomes and worker well-being.