Dr. Xiuxiang Pan (p), Prof. Dimitris Ballas

Does the same employment trajectory produce the same wellbeing consequences everywhere? The employment–wellbeing literature presents an implicit assumption of spatial invariance. This paper argues that the relationship between employment instability and wellbeing is fundamentally shaped by spatial context—specifically, the regional development condition and the national institutional setting. Place is not merely where instability happens, but a constitutive force that conditions how it translates into material hardship and subjective suffering. We integrate two previously isolated literatures—the macro-level ‘geography of discontent’ literature and the employment–wellbeing literature, by asking: how do urban–rural contexts and European welfare regimes moderate the wellbeing penalty of disadvantageous employment trajectories?
We advance three competing hypotheses. The amplification hypothesis predicts that unstable trajectories carry larger wellbeing penalties in rural and small-town settings, where thin labour markets limit recovery options—consistent with the “places that don’t matter” thesis. The buffering hypothesis predicts smaller penalties in rural areas due to lower living costs and informal support networks. The decoupling hypothesis predicts divergent patterns across wellbeing dimensions: urban contexts may amplify economic costs (high living expenses) while buffering psychological costs (anonymity), whereas rural contexts may buffer economic costs but amplify psychological harm (community stigma).
We use EU-SILC longitudinal microdata covering approximately 20–25 European countries. Exploiting the underutilized monthly activity calendar, we construct 48-month employment sequences for working-age adults across multiple entry cohorts. Wellbeing outcomes, including economic and psychology dimensions, are measured in the final year of the 48-month sequence period to address reverse causality. We then apply optimal matching and cluster analysis to identify a typology of monthly employment trajectories. Finally, we estimate the impact of various employment trajectories on individual wellbeing and how the association varies with regional background and country differences.
This paper makes three contributions. First, it provides the micro-level transmission mechanism linking regional development conditions to individual wellbeing through spatially contingent employment trajectories. Second, it redirects heterogeneity analysis from individual characteristics to spatial attributes, extending static regional wellbeing gaps with dynamic employment processes. Third, it tests whether spatial moderation is a universal structural feature or is itself conditioned by national welfare regimes. The findings carry direct implications for the EU’s place-sensitive social policy agenda.

Dr. Femke Cnossen (p), Davide Lunardon

We show how dissatisfaction with different job attributes relates to workers' job mobility. We distinguish between salary, tangible work arrangements and intangible attributes., using ten waves of the Dutch Working Conditions Survey (2014-2023) linked to administrative records covering over 400.000 workers. We find that dissatisfaction with intangible attributes (interesting work, learning opportunities and supervisors) is the strongest and most robust predictor of job separation, associated with a rise in the separation rate of three to five percentage points on a mean of 20.5%.
Different sources of dissatisfaction are associated with different mobility behaviours: salary dissatisfaction predicts job-to-job transitions, dissatisfaction with interesting work predicts exits into unemployment, and dissatisfaction with supervisors predicts transitions from wage employment into self-employment. These responses are partly cyclical: the relationship between intangible dissatisfaction and turnover is stronger in tighter labour markets. Overall, we show that the type of job attributes a worker is dissatisfied with matters both for the likelihood of leaving and for the kind of labour market transition that follows.

Ms Ruobing Li (p), Dr. Balázs Lengyel, Dr. Virág Ilyés

Local labor-market scale in Hungary is associated with a widening of gender inequality. Using the Admin3 linked employer-employee administrative panel (2003–2017), which covers a 50% sample of the Hungarian population, this study investigates how local economic factors shape the adjusted gender pay gap (GPG) across the full urban hierarchy of 197 districts.

The analysis identifies the structural drivers of spatial wage disparities in two stages. First, the study estimates wage models that recover district-by-gender adjusted gaps and assesses how their cross-district dispersion changes once firm wage premia are absorbed. The variance of district-level adjusted GPGs falls sharply when firm fixed effects are included: approximately 72% of the cross-district dispersion is accounted for by firm-specific pay premia and the spatial allocation of firms and workers. This suggests that firm composition and within-firm pay-setting are the primary sources of local gender-inequality differences.

Second, an individual fixed effects model is used to estimate wage returns associated with changes in local labor-market scale. By observing individuals who relocate across districts, the model identifies the district-size premium while controlling for time-invariant worker heterogeneity and spatial sorting. Given the log-transformed outcome, the results indicate a stark gender divergence in the benefits of urbanization: men capture a significant urban wage premium, whereas women receive almost no gains. Specifically, a 10% increase in district employment is associated with an approximate 0.19% wage increase for men, compared to a negligible 0.02% increase for women. Consequently, the adjusted GPG expands by 0.17 percentage points for every 10% growth in local employment scale.

These findings suggest that urban growth disproportionately rewards temporal flexibility. The results demonstrate that agglomeration is not gender-neutral, and address socio-spatial inequality requires both firm-level pay reforms and targeted urban policies, such as expanded childcare and improved transport connectivity, to ensure that the benefits of market scale are distributed equitably.