IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee presented one of his recent research papers at the London School of Economics CEP Well-being Seminar on 22 Feb 2024.

This paper, co-authored with Prof Francis Green at UCL, introduces a new well-being related threshold for bad jobs. The conceptualisation of bad jobs often entails low job quality, typically associated with job insecurity or low pay. These conceptualisations often adopt a simplistic framework, focusing on a single dimension of job quality, thereby leading to a potential misclassification of bad jobs.

In the paper, accordingly, a new method is proposed for defining the threshold of a ‘bad job’, based on a discontinuity in the relationship between a composite index of job quality and wellbeing.

Applied to the European Working Conditions Survey data, the evidence suggests that a cut-off threshold for ‘bad jobs’ is at the 10th percentile. Comparing workers in jobs below this threshold with those at the next decile, there is a distinctly large gap in psychological wellbeing, and in several other measures of wellbeing. Using this threshold gives a ‘bad jobs’/’other jobs’ dichotomy that discriminates on well-being far better than definitions based only on low earnings and job insecurity.

Using this new well-being threshold for bad jobs, the paper reveals that bad jobs are more common in poorer countries and in countries with weaker labour regulations, e.g., work councils and national minimum wage.

Two findings differentiate the distributional pattern of bad jobs from that of low-earnings jobs: first, the prevalence of bad jobs is greater in large establishments; second, there is no gender gap in the prevalence of bad jobs.