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

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.