Is Work Flexibility a Stairway to Heaven? The Story Told by Job Satisfaction in Europ

In this paper we investigate the relationship between di¤erent aspects of flexibility and job satisfaction using data taken from the 2001 Special Eurobarometer 56.1 "Social Exclusion and Modernization of Pension Systems". More speci?cally, we verify whether functional, numerical and time flexibility produce different impact on job satisfaction, also distinguishing between satisfaction for quantitative aspects (such as pay, hours of work and career prospects) and qualitative ones (such as motivation, job variety and on the job relations). Then, we test the impact of flexibility on job satisfaction for different types of workers (e.g. high or low skilled, young or old, male or female and country clusters). Taking into account of potential endogeneity, on the whole results from econometric analysis seem to point to a positive link between functional flexibility and job satisfaction and either no effect or a negative impact of numerical and time flexibility. With regard to estimation by groups, differences in the impact of flexibility on job satisfaction are particularly relevant among those groups that are characterized by significant gaps in the incidence of flexibility, such as the young and the old workers, the low and the high educated, Southern and Nordic countries' workers.