Happiness at Work: Essays on subjective wellbeing in the workplace and labor market

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays studying the extent to which subjective wellbeing shapes behaviors and outcomes in the workplace and labor market. The first essay studies an information-provision field experiment conducted on a large online jobs platform. The study collects data on the self-reported affective happiness of millions of workers across the USA, aggregates this to the level of companies, and then shows this information to some (randomly-allocated) job seekers on the platform but not others. I find that job seekers respond behaviorally to the provision of information about the happiness of incumbent workers at different organizations, and in doing so they re-allocate their applications away from lowhappiness and towards higher-happiness companies. In the second essay, I build on these findings by conducting a survey experiment that provides people with hypothetical choices between jobs at companies with varying levels of i) wage and ii) employee happiness. The results of this analysis suggest that people value workplace happiness and are, on average, willing to trade off wages in order to work at happier companies. In the final chapter, I investigate the relationship between positive affect and productivity. Studying the universe of call center sales workers at one of the UK’s largest employers, this research measures the happiness of workers on a week-to-week basis and links it to detailed administrative data on behavior and performance. Exploiting exogenous variation in employee happiness arising from differential visual exposure to bright or gloomy weather while at work, the results show a causal effect of worker happiness on sales in a field setting. Taken together, the findings of three chapters suggest that employee happiness has the potential to promote organizational performance by raising productivity, reducing turnover, and aiding recruitment.