Abstract EN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on subjective well-being.The first essay examines whether aggregate job satisfaction in a certain labormarket environment can have an impact on individual-level job satisfaction.We seek an answer to this question using two different datasets from the UnitedKingdom characterizing two different labor market environments: WorkplaceEmployment Relations Survey (WERS) at the workplace level (i.e., narrowlydefined worker groups) and British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) at thelocal labor market level (i.e., larger worker groups defined in industry × regioncells). Implementing an original empirical strategy to identify spillover effects,we find that one standard deviation increase in aggregate job satisfaction leadsto a 0.42 standard deviation increase in individual-level job satisfaction at theworkplace level and 0.15 standard deviation increase in individual-level jobsatisfaction at the local labor market level. These social interactions effectsiiiare sizable and should not be ignored in assessing the effectiveness of thepolicies designed to improve job satisfaction.Individuals tend to self-report higher subjective well-being levels on certaindays of the weeks than they do on the remaining days, controlling for observedvariation. The second essay tests whether this empirical observation suffersfrom selection bias by using the 2008 release of the British Household PanelSurvey. In other words, we examine if subjective well-being is correlated withunobserved characteristics that lead the individuals to take the interview onspecific days of the week. We focus on two distinct well-being measures: jobsatisfaction and happiness. We provide convincing evidence for both of thesemeasures that the interviews are not randomly distributed across the days ofthe week. In other words, individuals with certain unobserved characteristicstend to take the interviews selectively. We conclude that a considerable partof the day-of-the-week patterns can be explained by a standard “non-randomsorting on unobservables” argument rather than “mood fluctuations”. Thismeans that the day-of-the-week estimates reported in the literature are likelyto be biased and should be treated cautiously.In Sub-Saharan Africa, some scholars identify ethnicity as a cause of instability and poor economic growth, which is due to worse public policies. Eifert,Miguel, and Posner (2010) show that ethnic identification is more prominentduring competitive election periods in comparison to other identifying categories such as gender, religion, and class/occupation. The third essay utilizesdata from 12 Sub-Saharan African countries and over 40,000 respondents takenivfrom the Afrobarometer. It asks if individual subjective well-being changes inthe run up to competitive elections. We find strong evidence that individualsubjective well-being does change. It is positively related to the proximity toan election and this proximity effect depends on the competitiveness of theelection. We further investigate the background mechanisms behind this positive relationship i.e.: to what extent does well-being of the individual change ifthe party that the individual supports wins the election, and is there a changein well-being of the individual before and after the election? In addition, wedocument that ethnic identification also has a positive impact on individualwell-being after controlling for electoral cycle variables. Policy makers shouldinternalize these positive externalities driven from politically-induced ethnicidentification.