Work and wellbeing

CentrePiece article

Finding meaning at work

Helping employees assess their jobs through the lens of purpose increases productivity and narrows gender gaps in career choices...Read more...

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

19 June 2026

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Helping employees find 'meaning' improves performance and narrows gender gaps

A common way to boost employee motivation is to provide monetary incentives linked to a firm's goals. Oriana Bandiera finds that a different approach to motivation, which encourages employees to reassess their roles thro...Read more...

Oriana Bandiera

6 March 2026

CEP report

Road to recovery: Self-employed on the mend?

The eighth LSE-CEP survey of the self-employed shows weekly hours of the self-employed are now seeing some signs of recovery, compared with the last data collection in June 2023. The positive increase in work hours is tr...Read more...

Robert Blackburn, Stephen Machin and Maria Ventura

29 January 2026

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Automation is not hollowing out British factory jobs

Fears that new technology will wipe out jobs are as old as the factory floor. But new analysis by Aniket Baksy, Daniel Chandler and Peter John Lambert shows that rather than taking jobs away, automation in British factor...Read more...

Aniket Baksy, Daniel Chandler and Peter John Lambert

21 January 2026

CentrePiece article

Putting a value on safety

What the pandemic reveals about the risks that people are willing to take at work....Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

21 October 2025

CentrePiece article

Skills in the age of AI

A focus on wellbeing at work can help employees thrive....Read more...

Mary O'Mahony and Christopher A. Pissarides

21 October 2025

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Background matters, but not whether parents are immigrants: outcomes of children born in Denmark

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnin...Read more...

Alan Manning

3 July 2025

CEP discussion paper

Meaning at work

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D...Read more...

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

14 May 2025

CEP discussion paper

Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ...Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

6 May 2025

Book

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters

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Jan Emmanuel de Neve and George Ward

27 February 2025

CEP occasional paper

Mental health and employment

In this report we evaluate the benefits and costs of providing NICE recommended treatment for addiction or severe mental health problems over a two-year time horizon for one individual. We separately investigate addictio...Read more...

Isaac Parkes

4 September 2024

Journal article

Management Science:

Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity?

This paper provides evidence from a natural experiment on the relationship between positive affect and productivity. We link highly detailed administrative data on the behaviors and performance of all telesales workers a...Read more...

Clement S. Bellet, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

1 March 2024

Journal article

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership:

Footsie, yeah! Share prices and worker wellbeing

A small literature has shown that individual wellbeing varies with the price of company stock, but it is unclear whether this is due to wealth effects amongst those holding stock, or more general effects on sentiment, wi...Read more...

Alex Bryson, Andrew E. Clark and Colin P. Green

6 December 2021

CEP discussion paper

Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity?

This article provides quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between employee happiness and productivity in the field. We study the universe of call center sales workers at British Telecom (BT), one of the Unite...Read more...

Clement S. Bellet, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

18 October 2019

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Are you happy while you work?

Using a new data source permitting individuals to record their well-being via a smartphone, we explore within-person variance in individuals? well-being measured momentarily at random points in time. We find paid work is...Read more...

Alex Bryson and George MacKerron

1 February 2017

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Share capitalism and worker wellbeing

We show that worker wellbeing is determined not only by the amount of compensation workers receive but also by how compensation is determined. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been preoccupied with...Read more...

Alex Bryson, Andrew E. Clark, Richard B. Freeman and Colin P. Green

1 October 2016

CEP discussion paper

Does worker wellbeing affect workplace performance?

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees? subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significa...Read more...

Alex Bryson, John Forth and Lucy Stokes

15 July 2015

CEP discussion paper

Are You Happy While You Work?

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals? momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a...Read more...

Alex Bryson and George MacKerron

8 February 2013