My research focuses on wellbeing in the workplace. This work builds from, and is motivated by, the basic empirical observation, which I have established in earlier research, 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. Much of my ongoing work uses survey data I have collected in collaboration with the online jobs platform Indeed, which has enabled me to measure job satisfaction, meaning and purpose, work happiness, and perceived stress for over 15 million workers across the USA (and beyond) and to generate firm-level wellbeing estimates for over 110,000 firms.

A related line of research focuses on 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. Through a series of papers, I have explored how different measures of subjective wellbeing predict political beliefs and voting behavior at scale. This work has examined incumbent voting patterns in elections across Europe and the USA, and in the last few years I have turned my attention to trying to better understand the ways in which human wellbeing (or the lack of it) has shaped the global rise of populism and political polarization. 

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.