My research focuses on wellbeing in the workplace. This work builds from, and is motivated by, the basic empirical observation that how people feel at and about their work varies significantly across firms, even within tightly defined industries and locations. This research agenda has two main streams that ask i) why? and ii) so what? 

First, I investigate how factors like management practices, corporate culture, organizational structure, and worker sorting may shape these notable differences that exist between observationally otherwise very similar firms. Second, I examine how these firm-level differences in wellbeing impact organizational outcomes such as productivity, worker turnover, employee recruitment, profitability, and firm value. Finally, a related line of research focuses on emotions, political behavior, and public policy. Here I have studied the links between economic growth and happiness, the wellbeing dynamics of unemployment and job search, as well as the emotional foundations of voting and electoral outcomes. 

My research draws from multiple academic fields and has been published in leading journals across multiple disciplines, including management (Management Science), economics (Review of Economics and Statistics), psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist), and political science (American Journal of Political Science). Methodologically, my research uses field experiments, survey experiments, computational methods, and causal inference techniques combined with large-scale sources of digital trace and other observational data.