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The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding of the decisions on labour supply, with particular attention given to the role of conditions of a contract between an employer and an employee. In the paper the value, from the employee’s perspective, of different characteristics of an employment contract are assessed.

Discrete choice experiment methodology is applied to evaluate employment attributes. Using data from a dedicated survey of students and graduates of social sciences in Poland, parameters of the employment-related utility function are estimated with a multinomial logit model and random parameter logistic regression. Due to the opt-out alternative in the design, reservation wages for different types of contracts are calculated.

The paper suggests that development conditions and psychological aspects of work are extremely important for employees’ decisions and their reservation wages.

Due to limitations related to data generation process, generalisation of the results to the whole population is not possible.

The results of the study may help to develop tools of contract optimisation and remuneration systems. Such tools might lead to improvements in the efficiency of contracts in the labour market by simultaneously reducing employment costs and increasing workers’ utility.

The analysis of preferences and reservation wages contributes to our understanding of the observed wage differentials. It also helps to understand some apparent paradoxes of the labour supply behaviour, which are impossible to explain within the traditional approach to wage modelling.

The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of job satisfaction determinants of higher education graduates across six selected study domains.

Based on the theoretical considerations, derived from human capital theory and signalling theory, the authors formulate the model explaining job satisfaction as a broad measure of labour market success. Explanatory variables include various socio-demographic characteristics as well as market environment and process of learning, modes of teaching and study programme characteristics. Data used in the analysis comes from two special surveys of European research projects REFLEX and HEGESCO. Principal component analysis method and OLS regression were used to estimate model parameters.

The results of our research show the important role of characteristics of educational process, as well as individual graduates’ early work-related experience in predicting job satisfaction. Differences in job satisfaction determinants across domains may be to some extent explained by the differences in the labour market characteristics for graduates in given discipline. Variety of education-related characteristics taken into account in the empirical analysis of determinants of job satisfaction is a key valuable contribution to the research in the field.

Research findings indicate the areas of potential actions aimed at improving future job satisfaction which can be undertaken by higher education institutions’ management bodies.