Corporatism and job satisfaction

Phelps, Edmund, and Zoega, Gylfi—Corporatism and job satisfaction We introduce reported job satisfaction as a measure of economic performance and find it positively correlated with GDP per capita and the labor force participation rate in a sample of OECD countries and negatively correlated with unemployment. Moreover, we find that many measures of corporatism, which we define in the wider sense as institutions that hamper with the allocation of the factors of production and the distribution of income in a capitalist economy, are negatively correlated across countries with job satisfaction. Thus job satisfaction is positively correlated across countries with measures of the protection of property rights and negatively correlated with the volume of regulations of credit markets, labor markets and businesses, in addition to barriers to entrepreneurship, corruption and lack of access to capital. In contrast, measures of capitalism, such as the number of listed companies and market capitalization, are positively correlated with job satisfaction. Journal of Comparative Economics 41 (1) (2013) 35–47. The Center on Capitalism and Society, 1126 International Affairs Building, Columbia University 420 W. 118th st., MC 3334 New York, NY 10027, USA; Department of Economics, University of Iceland, Saemundargata 2, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland; Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet St., London WC1E 7HX, UK. 2013 Association for Comparative Economic Studies Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.