Revealed Job Preferencesby Employee Initiated Job Change

Many previous studies try to discover job preferences by directly asking individuals. Since itis not sure, whether answers to these surveys are relevant for actual behaviour, this empiricalexamination offers a different approach based on representative German data. Employees whoquit their job and find a new one, compare the two jobs with respect to eight jobcharacteristics: type of work, pay, chances of promotion, work load, commuting time, workhour regulations, fringe benefits and security against loss of job. It is argued that theobservation of many improvements (and few declines) for a certain attribute indicates aparticular relevance and high preference for this attribute. It turns out that pay and type ofwork are most important for employees in this sense. Differences across subgroups ofemployees with respect to individual characteristics such as sex and age are explored. Thosebetween East- and West-Germany diminish over time.[...]