Labor market behavior and well-being.

Summary My dissertation is composed of four separate chapters that share the same underlying topic of investigating how local conditions may affect labor supply, other behaviors, or such things as trust, social capital, subjective well-being (SWB), and reported happiness. The first chapter is entitled "Happy at Work? Employment and BES in Indonesia". In this chapter, I investigate whether working in the informal sector makes people worse off compared to those who work formally. The second chapter is titled after the results I find there: "When unemployment makes you unhappy, return to employment is faster". This second chapter estimates a model of unemployment duration that combines BES data to estimate unemployment duration as a function of BES loss when individuals entered unemployment. The third chapter, "Ethnic Diversity and Trust in Indonesia" links sources such as the census and survey data, and finds that ethnically diverse municipalities have lower levels of social capital and trust than more homogeneous municipalities. In the final chapter, I investigate whether income inequality at the municipal level is correlated with resident happiness, using Indonesian data. As a whole, these four chapters provide some conclusions about how local conditions-whether it is the industry composition of employment, the level of local inequality, or the ethnic composition-may affect people's happiness, their BES, and their labor market and other behaviors.