Employees’ wellbeing is important to the firms. Analysis of job satisfaction may give insight into various aspect of labor market behavior, such as worker productivity, absenteeism and job turn over. Little empirical work has been done on the relationship between structure of working environment and job satisfaction. This paper investigates the relationship between working environment, firm size and worker job satisfaction. We use a unique data of 28,240 British employees, Workplace Employee Relations Survey. In this data set the employee questionnaire is matched with the employer questionnaire. Four measures of job satisfaction considered are satisfaction with influence over job, satisfaction with amount of pay, satisfaction with sense of achievement and satisfaction with respect from supervisors. They are all negatively related to the firm size implying lower levels of job satisfaction in larger firms. The firm size in return is negatively related to the degree of flexibility in the working environment. The small firms have more flexible work environments. This is the first study that explore the effect of work amenities. We further find that, contrary to the previous results lower levels of job satisfaction in larger firms can not necessarily be attributed to the inflexibility in their structure of working environment.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had a significant foothold in the Anatolian geography for the majority of the early 19th century, through their sizeable human capital intervention. Through an extensive archival work, we study the impact of human capital intervention on development outcomes. Using the spatial variation in the built and functional mission stations, we find areas closer to ABCFM missions have presently higher income by 5%-17%, and higher general development index by 0.07-0.12 standard deviation in 10 km proximity. We identify the mission impact by exploiting a placebo set from the group that was conceived but not carried out, and also an exogenous re-partition of the working region as an instrumental variable strategy. The underlying mechanisms are labor productivity in the agriculture sector, which allows for greater skill differentiation and structural transformation. Gender roles in education are also significantly transformed.