Employee satisfaction trajectories and their effect on customer satisfaction and repatronage intentions

Does improving employee happiness affect customer outcomes? The current study attempts to answer this question by examining the impact of employee satisfaction trajectories (i.e., systematic changes in employee satisfaction) on customer outcomes. After accounting for employees’ initial satisfaction levels, the analyses demonstrate the importance of employee satisfaction trajectories for customer satisfaction and repatronage intentions, as well as identify customer-employee contact as a necessary conduit for their effect. From a macro perspective, employee satisfaction trajectories strongly impact customer satisfaction for companies with significant employee–customer interaction, but not for companies without such interaction. From a micro perspective, employee satisfaction trajectories influence customer repatronage intentions for frequent customers, but not for infrequent customers. These effects are robust to controlling for previous customer evaluations and recent employee evaluations. Overall, these findings extend the dominant view of examining static, employee satisfaction levels and offer important implications for the management of the organizational frontline.

     

Globalisation, internal labour markets and the migration of the highly skilled

Over the last decade highly skilled migration has been gaining relative importance in European migration flows. Following the goods and factor markets the market for highly skilled labour has thus also started to globalise. How are the globalisation processes of the world-wide goods, capital and labour markets interlinked? What role do international enterprises and their internal labour markets play in increasing highly skilled migration? What trends can be expected for the future?     

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Current issues in European migration

The authors examine recent migration patterns into and within the European Union. Issues involving asylum and migration policy are discussed, and problems caused by differing naturalization practices in different countries are considered. Skill patterns of migrants and problems in labor markets are also investigated.     

Filling vacancies: an empirical analysis of the cost and benefit of search in the labour market

This paper investigates empirically the factors that affect the cost–benefit ratio of employers’ search. The empirical analysis is based on a small Dutch data set containing individual information on filled vacancies. It is found that firms that use advertisements during recruitment are sensitive to labour market conditions; their search cost per applicant rises (drops) in tight (slack) labour markets because of the diminished ability of advertisements to generate applicants in tight labour markets. Furthermore, it is found that the high search cost incurred by posting identical vacancies is more than compensated for by the benefits from having a larger flow of applicants.     

The role of hard-to-obtain information on ability for the school-to-work transition

When information about the abilities of job seekers is difficult to obtain, statistical discrimination by employers may be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage-setting process. In this article, we use a unique, longitudinal survey that follows the PISA 2000 students in their early educational and work–life careers. We find that a deviance in the PISA test scores from what one would have predicted based on easy-to-obtain observable characteristics influences the probability of succeeding in the transition from compulsory schooling to a firm-based apprenticeship significantly but in a non-symmetric way. Only those who had a test result below their predicted result have significantly lower chances of getting an apprenticeship. We also find evidence that the importance of hard-to-obtain information on ability is further revealed in the course of the apprenticeship.     

Quits,layoffs, and job destruction

We examine the quit–layoff distinction and its implications for job destruction from the employer's perspective. Using a set of panel data of Dutch firms, we get the following results. First, in addition to layoffs, quits contribute to the speed of downward adjustment of labour. Second, about 22% of the jobs of workers who resigned are destroyed. It is not clear-cut whether these resignations are initiated by employers or employees.     

Measuring Transparency in the Dutch Mortgage Market

Summary This paper is an empirical study of pricing in the Dutch mortgage market. For a narrowly defined set of endowment mortgages (with a fixed lending rate of 10 years), we find that the price dispersion within lenders is larger than the dispersion across lenders. Prices remain dispersed across lenders, even after controlling for characteristics of the borrower, the municipality and the government bond rate. Apparently, the mortgage market is not fully transparent, which impedes competition in the mortgage market. We also find that the price dispersion for mortgages sold by banks is smaller than that for mortgages sold by other lenders. A likely explanation is that lenders using middlemen have higher agency costs. We wish to express our gratitude to the National Mortgage Guarantee (Nationale Hypotheek Garantie) in Zoetermeer, in particular Karel Schiffer and Hans Mersmann, for providing us access to their data as well as for their hospitality. We are grateful to Wim van Assenbergh, Harry Garretsen, Ralph de Haas, Jan Lemmen, Clemens Kool, Job Swank and two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on previous versions of this article.