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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
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Issue of 2018‒01‒01
five papers chosen by |
| By: | Jeffrey Flory; Andreas Leibbrandt; John List |
| Abstract: | Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehaviour - bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls across more than 80 workers, we use a natural field experiment to investigate how different wage contracts influence workers' propensity to break workplace rules in harmful ways. Our findings show that even though standard relative performance pay contracts, relative to a fixed wage scheme, increase productivity, they have a dark side: they cause considerable cheating and sabotage of co-workers. Yet, even in such environments, by including an unexpected bonus, the employer can substantially curb worker misbehavior. In this manner, our findings reveal how employers can effectively leverage bonuses to eliminate undesired behaviors induced by performance pay contracts. |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:natura:00617&r=ltv |
| By: | Orazio Attanasio (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London); Sarah Cattan (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Emla Fitzsimons (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute of Education, University of London); Costas Meghir (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Yale University); Marta Rubio Codina (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute for Fiscal Studies) |
| Abstract: | We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signi cant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of material and time investments in these children and evaluate the impact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The e ffects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, which have strong e ffects on outcomes and are complementary to both maternal skills and child's baseline skills. |
| Date: | 2017–04–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:17/06&r=ltv |
| By: | Richard Blundell (Institute for Fiscal Studies and IFS and UCL); Jack Britton (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Monica Costa Dias (Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute for Fiscal Studies); Eric French (Institute for Fiscal Studies and IFS and UCL) |
| Abstract: | Estimates of the effect of health on employment differ signi cantly from study to study due to differences in method, data, institutional background and health measure. We assess the importance of these differences using a unifi ed framework to interpret and contrast estimates of the impact of health on employment based on various measures of health and estimation procedures. This is done for the US and England. We fi nd that subjective and objective health measures, as well as subjective measures instrumented by objective measures produce similar estimates if a sufficiently large number of objective measures is used. Reducing the number of objective measures used compromises their ability to capture work capacity and biases estimates downwards. Failure to account for initial conditions leads to an overstatement of the effect of health on employment. We also find that a carefully constructed single index of subjective health yields estimates that are very similar to those obtained with multiple measures. Overall, declines in health can explain between 3% and 15% of the decline in employment between ages 50 and 70. These effects are larger among high-school dropouts and tend to drop with education; they are also larger in the US than in England. Finally, cognition has little added explanatory power once we also control for health, suggesting that cognition is not a key driver of employment at these ages. |
| Keywords: | Health, cognition, labor supply, retirement |
| JEL: | I10 J26 E24 |
| Date: | 2017–08–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:17/18&r=ltv |
| By: | Marion Goussé (Département d'Economique, Université Laval - Université Laval); Nicolas Jacquemet (PSE - Paris School of Economics, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Jean-Marc Robin (ECON - Département d'économie - Sciences Po, Department of Economics, University College London - UCL - University College of London [London]) |
| Abstract: | We document changes in labour supply, wage and education by gender and marital status using the British Household Panel Survey, 1991-2008, and seek to disentangle the main channels behind these changes. To this end, we use a version of Goussé, Jacquemet, and Robin (2016)'s search-matching model of the marriage market with labour supply, which does not use information on home production time inputs. We derive conditions under which the model is identified. We estimate different parameters for each year. This allows us to quantify how much of the changes in labour supply, wage and education by gender and marital status depends on changes in the preferences for leisure of men and women and how much depends on changes in homophily. |
| Keywords: | Search-matching, sorting, assortative matching, structural estimation, collective labour supply |
| Date: | 2017–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-01476509&r=ltv |
| By: | Andrea Martinangeli (Max Planck Institute for Tax and Public Finance); Peter Martinsson (University of Gothenburg); Amrish Patel (University of East Anglia) |
| Abstract: | Can prior voluntary redistribution improve coordination? We theoretically show that distributive preferences, forward induction and signalling all imply that it can. We then experimentally test our predictions by allowing subjects to redistribute part of their endowment before playing a battle of the sexes game. To identify whether the redistribution option increases coordination, and why, we also run experiments with no redistribution and forced redistribution. Our results show that the redis- tribution option does indeed significantly increase coordination. Disentangling the reasons why, we find that behaviour is most consistent with distributive preferences and one-step of forward induction (rather than signalling or two-steps of forward induction). |
| Keywords: | coordination, redistribution, experiment, distributive preferences, forward induction, signalling altruism |
| JEL: | C72 D02 |
| Date: | 2017–11–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:ueaeco:2017_07&r=ltv |