What makes a job better? Survey evidence from job changers

This article uses Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) data to explore the role of changes in job characteristics in determining self-assessed job quality. The analysis includes individuals who started a new job between 2021 and 2023. We determine that changes in pay and benefits alone incorrectly predict self-assessed changes in overall job quality 30 percent of the time. We also find strong evidence that job characteristics beyond pay and benefits influence workers’ self-assessment of overall job quality, although pay and benefits remain important predictors of self-assessed job quality. In particular, workers’ interest in their work has a stronger effect than changes in pay and benefits in predicting whether job changers view their new job as better. Improvements in pay and benefits are strongly correlated with improvements in other job characteristics for workers with less education but less so for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The stronger positive correlation implies that differences in pay and benefits understate differences in total job quality to a greater degree among workers with less education.