Situated in China’s market transition this study examines the relationship between economic sector and a worker’s happiness in post-reform urban China. involuntary. We attribute the higher level of reported happiness in the state sector than in the private sector to the disparity by sector in the provision of interpersonal welfare benefits. Those who made voluntary state-to-private techniques experienced a trade-off in taking pleasure in higher payoffs while losing job security whereas involuntary mobiles experienced downward mobility and suffered a long-term psychological penalty. status 10 personal annual total income current International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (ISEI) score work status work hours per week as well as province and 12 months dummies to capture potential period fluctuations. Only respondents with total information on all variables are included in multivariate analyses and the final sample size is usually 5915. Appendix Table A1 presents descriptive statistics for these variables by survey year. Table 1 shows comparisons between state and private sectors in terms of happiness personal annual total income and fringe benefits. While Table 1 shows common levels of happiness increasing in both sectors from 2003 to 2008 it also indicates that workers in the private sector Lobetyolin are significantly less happy than their counterparts in the state sector in all three survey years. Although workers in the state sector earned slightly (statistically insignificant) less than workers in the private sector over the period they enjoyed significantly more fringe benefits as measured by the total quantity of benefits and proportions of people entitled to benefits. These analyses confirm earlier research findings that this income advantage of the private sector over the state sector is usually Rabbit polyclonal to SUMO3. diminishing and also lend support to our hypothesis that interpersonal welfare benefits have become a salient indication of between-sector interpersonal inequality and an underlying cause of sectoral differences in happiness. Table 1 Sectoral Differences in Happiness Income and Benefits Urban China (N=5915) 4.3 Methods We use ordinary least squares regression as the main analytical strategy in our study.11 For supplementary analysis we also use the propensity score matching method to check for the robustness Lobetyolin of regression results. As the number of movers in each survey year is relatively small we pool all three datasets together for multivariate analyses. We obtain similar results albeit with much less statistical power if we break up the analyses by survey years. 5 Empirical Results 5.1 Observed Sectoral Differences in Happiness First we conduct Lobetyolin simple comparisons in happiness between state- and private-sector workers the results of which are reported in Table 2. Model 1 which presents simple sectoral difference in happiness with only 12 months dummies indic status plays a poor role in determining people’s happiness perhaps because the majority of our respondents are urban local residents. Finally findings show that Chinese Lobetyolin people’s happiness in each sector increased over the survey years. 5.2 Comparisons in Happiness Considering Selectivity in Mobility Regression results in the previous section are informative but may suffer from potential biases without taking selectivity in mobility into the private sector into account. Our next set of analyses uses the processed job mobility groups comparing reported happiness among state-sector Lobetyolin stayers Lobetyolin voluntary state-to-private mobiles (of the iron rice bowl are significantly less happy than those who did not. Table 3 OLS Regressions of Happiness on Economic Sectors Considering Mobility Urban China To test the robustness of the results we further restrict the mobility period to 10 years prior to the survey 12 months: 1993-2003 for CGSS-2003 1996 for CGSS-2006 and 1998-2008 for CGSS-2008. We obtain similar results using these restrictions as reported in columns 4 and 5 of Table 3. To test whether sectoral differences in happiness were stable during this time period we added year-mobility group conversation terms to the above models but found no significant interactions (results not shown here). 5.3 Robustness Checks The preceding results could be influenced.