The daily grind: Cash needs and labor supply

Dupas, Pascaline; Robinson, Jonathan; Saavedra, Santiago

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2020.06.017

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…workers are willing to pay for faster peers, a shame-type mechanism can only be operative inasmuch as it serves as a commitment device, inducing workers to reach a higher level of effort that they truly would like to achieve. This type of behavior would be consistent with the commitment and goal-setting behavior observed in Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan (2010) and Dupas, Robinson, and Saavedra (2018).…”

Section: Psychological Mechanisms: Motivation Vs Shamesupporting

confidence: 84%

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

Brune¹,

Chyn

Kerwin

2018

SSRN Journal

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This paper studies workplace peer effects by randomly varying work assignments at a tea estate in Malawi. We find that increasing mean peer ability by 10 percent raises productivity by 0.3 percent. This effect is driven by the responses of women. Neither production nor compensation externalities cause the effect because workers receive piece rates and do not work in teams. Additional analyses provide no support for learning or socialization as mechanisms. Instead, peer effects appear to operate through "motivation": given the choice to be reassigned, most workers prefer working near high-ability co-workers because these peers motivate them to work harder.

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Section: Psychological Mechanisms: Motivation Vs Shamesupporting

confidence: 84%

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

Brune¹,

Chyn

Kerwin

2018

SSRN Journal

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“…If our results hold in other settings, then in agriculture-based lowincome countries, asking about farm activities 6-12 months after they have ended will lead to exaggerated estimates of the total days and hours household members spend working on their plots and farms. These findings may even hold outside the context of agriculture, for instance, in settings in which some but not other components of the labor calculation face considerable variability (for example, see Dupas, Robinson, and Saavedra 2015).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Not your average job: Measuring farm labor in Tanzania

Arthi

Beegle

Weerdt

et al. 2018

Journal of Development Economics

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Understanding the constraints to agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among farming households in rural Tanzania. Agricultural labor estimates obtained through weekly surveys are compared with the results of reporting in a single end-of-season recall survey. The findings show strong evidence of recall bias: people in traditional recall-style modules reported working up to four times as many hours per person-plot relative to those reporting labor on a weekly basis. Recall bias manifests both in the intensive and extensive margins of labor reporting: while hours are over-reported in recall, the number of people and plots active in agricultural work are under-reported. The evidence suggests that this recall bias is driven not only by failures in memory, but also by the mental burdens of reporting on highly variable agricultural work patterns to provide a typical estimate. All things equal, studies suffering from this bias would understate agricultural labor productivity.

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“…Yet, it is still poorly understood how the bracketing of goals matters. For example, taxi drivers often appear to set narrowly bracketed goals corresponding to a daily income target (Camerer et al 1997, Dupas andRobinson 2016). At first glance, this is puzzling.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivational goal bracketing: An experiment

Koch

Nafziger

2020

Journal of Economic Theory

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We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket-daily goals or a weekly goal-and within that bracket let subjects set goals for how much they want to work over a one-week period. Our theoretical model predicts (i) that weekly goals create incentives to compensate for a lower than desired performance today with the promise to work harder tomorrow, whereas daily goals exclude such excuses; (ii) that subjects with daily goals set higher goals in aggregate and work harder than those with weekly goals. Our data support these predictions. Surprisingly, however, when goals are combined with an externally enforced commitment that requires subjects to spend less than a minute each day on the task to get started working, performance deteriorates because of high dropout rates from the task.

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The daily grind: Cash needs and labor supply

Cited by 19 publications

References 23 publications

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

Not your average job: Measuring farm labor in Tanzania

Motivational goal bracketing: An experiment

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