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How Much are you Willing to Accept for Being Away From Home? Internal Migration and Job Satisfaction Among Formal-Informal Ecuadorian Workers

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Abstract

Recently, migration and migrated distance significantly affects people's mood and satisfaction, and this idea has been recently incorporated in literature. The objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between migrated distance and job satisfaction in Ecuador distinguishing between formal and informal workers. We use a repeated cross-section data from the National Survey of Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment from the period 2014–2017, and ordered probit models with random parameters to meet our objective. Our results suggest that there is a negative and heterogeneous relationship between distance on migration and job satisfaction. Moreover, we found that formal workers should be compensated at $ 0.51 USD and informal workers should be compensated at $ 0.59 USD per kilometer migrated to mitigate the negative impact of migration. These results have important policy implications, for instance, the need to promote labor policies that promote labor well-being and offset the negative effects of long-distance migration.

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Data Availability

Data are available upon request from the author.

Notes

  1. A parish is a third order spatial unit, being a smaller spatial unit than a province and a canton. Ecuador has 1499 parishes.

  2. The function is calculated using R software as follows:

    dist2 <—function(lat_a, lon_a, lat_b, lon_b).

    {

    res = (acos(sin(lat_a * 0.01745329252) * sin(lat_b * 0.01745329252) + (cos(lat_a * 0.01745329252) * cos(lat_b * 0.01745329252) * cos(lon_a * 0.01745329252—lon_b * 0.01745329252))))) * 57.29577951 * 111.194).

    res}

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge and thank the wise comments of two anonymous referees and the financial support of the Universidad Nacional de Loja research project: 38-DI-FJSA-2023.

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Cristian Ortiz: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data. Data curation. Reviewing and Editing, Writing – original draft. Aldo Salinas: literature review. Supervision. Validation, Writing- Reviewing and Editing.; conclusions; final approval of the version to be submitted. Johanna Alvarado: Reviewing and Editing, Writing – original draft. Viviana Huachizaca: Reviewing and Editing, Writing – original draft.

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Ortiz, C., Salinas, A., Alvarado, J. et al. How Much are you Willing to Accept for Being Away From Home? Internal Migration and Job Satisfaction Among Formal-Informal Ecuadorian Workers. Applied Research Quality Life (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-024-10309-w

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