We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event of plant closure as an exogenous trigger of job switching. In this case, we find no significantly positive effect of job changes on job satisfaction. Our findings complement research on workers' well-being and concern labor market policies and human resource management.Your heart must always be ready to leave, and ready to begin again, must form new bonds with courage and without regret. Every beginning offers a magic power that protects us and helps us to endure. 1

SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW Berlin This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences:

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility. JEL Classification Codes: I31, J26

We use German panel data to examine how fixed-term employment affects utility derived from working. In contrast to previous research, we present evidence that working on a temporary contract lowers current job satisfaction. We discover that the honeymoon effect of a new job must be considered to reveal this result. J ob insecurity appears to be the source of dissatisfaction associated with fixed-term employment. We also consider regional unemployment and perceived employment security to shed light on the basic notion of flexicurity policies. Finally, we apply a life course perspective on employment careers to discuss the overall role of temporary employment for individua l job satisfaction .1 Here and in the following, we use the terms 'fixed -term' and 'temporary' synonymously.