In this assignment, you work individually and submit your report individually. The assignment is based on a paper: Oswald, Andrew J., Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi. 2015. “Happiness and...

Summary:
Can happiness make a human more productive? In order to answer this question a series of
tests were performed on 148 participants by subjecting them to short happiness shock to
induce happiness followed by a set of tests to evaluate the performance. The experiments have
shown a positive relation between human happiness and human productivity.
Introduction:
The investigation addresses the question that whether “happiness” make human beings more
productive, a question that has been of interest to economists, social, psychological, and
ehavioral scientists, employers and policy makers. In order to induce happiness among the
treatment group to understand the “short-term” positive effect of happiness using short-
happiness shock in the laboratory followed by a performance test. Erez and Isen (2002) also
studied the effect positive shocks on performance by manipulating the mood of 97 test subjects
y gifting half of them with a candy bag and were told to solve nine anagrams; those who
eceived candy performed better and solved more anagrams. The causal linkages between
productivity and happiness is still unknown to the economists, behavioral scientists and other
esearchers in the field despite extensive research spanning over 70 years on productivity at the
personal and plant level (e.g., Caves 1974; Lazear 1981; Ichniowski and Shaw 1999; Siebert and
Zubanov 2010; Segal 2012). There is a growing one on the measurement of human well-being
(e.g., Easterlin 2003; Van Praag and Fe
er-I-Ca
onell 2004; Layard 2005; Ifcher and Zarghamee
2011; and Benjamin et al. 2012).
The question of why it is so important to understand this link between the happiness and
productivity or whether there is a link at all, has been a long-standing management problem
addressed from time to time. There are various indicators used for investigating happiness such
as job satisfaction, quality of work life, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect.
Bockerman and Ilmakunnas (2012) with instrumental variables estimation found an increase in
the measure of job satisfaction by one within-plant standard deviation increases value-added
per hours worked in manufacturing by 6.6% in Finnish manufacturing plants over the period
1996–2001. Similar to that another study by Edmans (2012) showed that levels of job
satisfaction appear to be predictive of future stock market performance. Buhai and Cottini
(2008) estimated the impact of work environment health and safety practice on firm
performance using Danish longitudinal register along with firm business accounts and detailed
survey data on workplace conditions. As expected, a substantially positive productivity effect
was produced...