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The main aim of this study was to examine gender differences in job satisfaction in Europe.

For the empirical analysis, data from the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey were used. Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition with a principal component analysis (PCA) aggregated variable, after unconditional quantile regressions in a multiple imputation background, was implemented.

Women report higher job satisfaction than men do. Women were significantly more satisfied than men for the middle levels of the job satisfaction distribution.

This study expands the evidence on the determinants of job satisfaction in the European labour market by applying a recent form of decomposition that invests in unconditional quantile regression (UQR). To the best of this study knowledge, this is the first time that the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition with a PCA aggregated variable after unconditional quantile regression has been employed to study gender-based differences in job satisfaction.

There is extensive literature on the determinants of job tenure insecurity. However, very little is known about the individual drivers of labour market insecurity. Additionally, while a piece of literature shows that volunteering improves workers' income, no study considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of labour market insecurity if they lost or resigned their jobs. Therefore, purpose of this paper is to study whether workers who volunteer are less likely to perceive labour market insecurity.

The paper employs data from the sixth European working conditions survey which provides a great deal of information on working conditions. For the empirical investigation, probit model as well as robustness analysis have been implemented.

Results show that employees who do voluntary activities have a greater likelihood of declaring perceived labour market insecurity, which is nearly 3 percentage points lower, than employees who do not volunteer. Findings suggest that governments need to improve the relationship between for-profit and non-profit sectors to encourage volunteering.

This is the first study which considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of “labour market insecurity”. Most of the studies on “labour market insecurity” do not focus on the workers individual characteristics but mainly on the labour markets institutional characteristics and welfare regimes differences.

The paper studies the simultaneous effect of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health across nine European countries while controlling, among other things, for socioeconomic characteristics and social and cultural participation.

This paper employs the 2006 wave of the EU-SILC dataset for estimating recursive trivariate probit models using instrumental variables.

The paper finds that although formal volunteering and informal volunteering are correlated with each other, they have different impacts on health. Formal volunteering is never correlated with higher self-perceived individual health except in the Netherlands. In contrast, informal volunteering is related to lower self-perceived individual health in Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy.

The first limitation concerns the absence of other measures of volunteering, such as volunteering hours that are not available in the employed dataset. The second limitation is that the dataset collection on social and cultural variables in EU-SILC is cross-sectional while the optimal dataset should be a panel data. The third limitation is that instrumental variables are observed in the same year of declaring self-perceived individual health while the optimal timing would be at least one year before.

Findings of the paper show that formal volunteering has no effect on self-perceived individual health while informal volunteering has negative consequences.

Volunteering is performed because of an individual decision and could be considered a consequence of how social responsibilities are distributed within countries. Our results show that informal volunteering has a negative effect on health; this is likely to depend on how people manage stress coming from performing this altruistic activity. It is likely that a more cautious distribution of social responsibilities could prevent the negative effects of informal volunteering on health.

The originality of the present paper is in simultaneously examining the impact of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived individual health. Furthermore, most of the existing studies on formal volunteering and health focus on a single country; this paper compares nine European countries characterized by different social, cultural, economic, and institutional features. Finally, the paper addresses the issue of reverse causation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0548

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the determinants of job satisfaction in Italy with particular emphasis on social relations.

This paper uses the data from the Multiscopo Survey of Households (MSH) conducted by the Italian Central Statistical Office for the years 1993-1995-1998-2000 for empirical investigations with ordered probit and robustness tests. A statistical matching procedure to impute missing values on household income in MSH is also performed.

The paper finds that social interactions matter. While visits to relatives are not statistically significant, volunteer work and the frequency of meetings with friends are significantly and positively correlated with job satisfaction, with church attendance having the biggest impact on job satisfaction. These results seem to confirm the main assumption of the paper: social relations are helpful in gaining more and in improving career prospects. The findings also show that meetings with friends increase job satisfaction through self-perceived health, suggesting a “buffering effect” of the networks of friends. In addition, results for Italy confirm findings gathered from job satisfaction studies with some novel evidence.

The role of social relations in job satisfaction has received no attention. The paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first empirical analysis on the relationship between social relations and job satisfaction. Overall, the value-added of the study is twofold. First, it adds a new piece of evidence to the existing literature on job satisfaction, i.e. the effects of social relations. To the best of the knowledge, there are no studies which consider social interactions as determinants of job satisfaction. Second, it extends the country evidence on the determinants of job satisfaction.