Departmental Research Seminar

Self-Detrimental Avoidance of Rest

Across many cultures, resting instead of working is viewed as a barrier to higher earnings. This belief is also reflected in many canonical economic models. Recent empirical evidence highlighting the productivity benefits of rest challenges this belief. Yet, existing work tends to ignore individuals’ demand for restful activities and whether it aligns with their returns. In the context of an online labor market experiment in South Africa, we explore whether workers capitalize on the returns to short rest periods. After eliciting demand for rest, we estimate returns to rest for the same individuals and find that mandated rest boosts productivity by 0.3 standard deviations, thus making up for forgone earnings from resting. At the same time, only 19% of workers voluntarily choose to rest. Contrary to the notion of selection on returns, workers with high financial returns to rest do not select into rest. We provide suggestive evidence that misperceived financial returns are driving the disconnect between demand for and returns to rest. Our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that individuals may be misallocating effort between resting and working and could reach higher overall utility by working less. This highlights the importance of understanding misperceptions around rest, especially in light of the economic burden of long-term costs of overworking such as burnout.

PhD Candidate

College Alumni Networks and Mobility Across Local Labor Markets

We quantify the impact of alumni networks on the geographic mobility of job seekers for nearly 1,400 US colleges and universities. We use detailed employment and education information on LinkedIn users to isolate college-educated workers who faced an exogenous job separation in a mass layoff or firm closure. Using a nested logit model of location choice, we compare the migration decisions of job seekers who were displaced in the same city and who attended different but similar and geographically proximate universities. We find that a 1% increase in the number of co-alumni in the city of displacement increases a job seeker’s odds of staying there by 0.4%. Conditional on moving, a 1% increase in a potential destination’s number of co-alumni increases the odds of choosing that city over another by 0.9%. Co-alumni may both impact job search and provide local amenities. Using data on the presence or absence of co-alumni at new jobs, we conclude that the job search channel is particularly important. Co-alumni from the same or neighboring graduating class have much larger impacts on location choice, indicating true network effects rather than idiosyncratic matches between alumni of certain colleges and jobs in certain cities. We also find strong impacts of having more local co-alumni who work in the same industry.

Toward an Interdisciplinary Political Economy of Wages

This talk will review how some social scientists have transcended disciplinary boundaries in their scholarship on wage formation and propose specific pathways for further trespassing. The speaker contends that an interdisciplinary political economy should connect power to prices. This means that economists should bring power—including political influence and social status—into the heart of their analysis of wage formation, and sociologists and political scientists should extend their analysis of social structure and power dynamics to their endpoint in wage levels.

Heterogeneous Labor Market Dynamics

Churn and Stability: The Heterogeneity of Flows among Employment, Job Search, and Non-Market Activities

Authors: Robert E. Hall and Marianna Kudlyak

Some people hold the same job for years and never leave the job to search for another job, or to pursue a non-market activity. Others remain out of the labor force for years. Yet others engage in churn, making frequent transitions among work, job search, and time out of the labor force. We model the diverse populations of women and men as containing five types of members, each behaving according to principles of rational choice, but behaving differently because of heterogeneous preferences and wages. We find: Among women, 59 percent of all unemployment arises from one segment of the population accounting for only 5 percent of the adult population. Short-term jobs occur frequently and are partly a substitute for unemployment---they are extensions of the search process. And churn is higher if measured to include movements turnover in short-term jobs---short-term jobs have an important role in the job-finding process.

Who Bears the Brunt of Recessions?

Authors: Mark Bognanni, Robert E. Hall, Marianna Kudlyak and David Wiczer.

Colocation and Knowledge Diffusion: Evidence from Million Dollar Plants

This paper uses the entry of large corporations into U.S. counties during the 1980s and 1990s to analyze the effect of plant opening on local innovation activity. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting information on the revealed ranking of possible locations for large plants. Under the identifying assumption that locations not chosen (losers) are a counterfactual for the chosen location (winner), we have two main empirical findings. First, patents of these large corporations are 82\% more likely to be cited in the winning counties relative to the losing counties after entry. The increase in citations is stronger for more recent patents whereas patent quality does not seem to play an important role. Second, patenting by incumbent inventors in the winning county increases after the entry announcement by 10\% with respect to patenting by incumbents in losing counties. An additional effect on patent quality is present when these large entering corporations are have a history of intensive patenting activity. One can infer from these findings that geographical proximity increases knowledge diffusion and that local inventors benefit from the entry of top corporations into their county.

Paid With(out) Purpose: Perceptions, Preferences, and the Meaning of Work

I develop a novel online experiment with 387 subjects on Prolific and simple utility model to examine how workers respond to reported work meaning. Workers appear to strongly value different aspects of work and be willing to give up other incentives for their best work match. 31% of workers then appear not to value meaning in their work, 27% appear not to value work pay, 30% appear to value both, and 12% cannot be characterized. Overall, 57% of workers are willing to sacrifice up to 14% of possible pay in their pursuit of meaningful work. For workers who value work meaning, I estimate positive impacts of meaningfulness on the quantity and quality of output, although these effects appear only for a task with prosocial framing. Finally, I validate a light-touch treatment designed to increase worker awareness of the value they place on meaning, again finding effects only for workers who seek meaning in their work. Importantly, raising worker awareness of work meaning has no impact on the types of incentives they seek out. These results offer insights into how such interventions and preferences for work meaning might be leveraged in organizational settings.

Hamilton’s Rule for Humans: Cooperative Breeding with a Role for Reciprocity and Culture

We study how kinship and reciprocity shape giving and child care support in societies where market-based solutions are limited. We extend Hamilton’s rule to incorporate reciprocity and genetic relatedness and test it using behavioral data from dictator games and survey from remote matrilocal and patrilocal villages in northeast India (N=406 parents of young children). We replicate with data from urban Manila neighborhoods (N=301) and the Solomon Islands (N=624). Consistent with predictions, transfers to recipients increase with genetic relatedness to the donor and even more with relatedness to the donor’s child—a hallmark of reciprocity anchored in shared genetic investment. Non-anonymous conditions amplify giving, especially to non-kin. Cultural norms shape cooperation, but do not trump relatedness. These results underscore the role of affinal ties and reciprocal exchange in sustaining cooperation, and suggest a mechanism through which cooperative breeding can contribute to the emergence of generalized reciprocity and human sociality.