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Full-Text Articles in Economics
Minimum Wages And Racial Discrimination In Hiring: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida
Minimum Wages And Racial Discrimination In Hiring: Evidence From A Field Experiment, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
When minimum wages increase, employers may respond to the regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a correspondence study with 35,000 applications around ex-ante uncertain minimum wage increases in three U.S. states. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19 percent less likely to receive a callback than equivalent applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce callbacks for all applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80 percent. Racial inequality decreases because firms disproportionately reduce callbacks to lower-quality white applicants who benefited from discrimination under lower …
Minimum Wage Increases Reduce Racial Disparities During Hiring, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida
Minimum Wage Increases Reduce Racial Disparities During Hiring, Alec Brandon, Justin E. Holz, Andrew Simon, Haruka Uchida
Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs
No abstract provided.
Jobseekers’ Beliefs About Comparative Advantage And (Mis)Directed Search, Andrea Kiss, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, Lukas Hensel
Jobseekers’ Beliefs About Comparative Advantage And (Mis)Directed Search, Andrea Kiss, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, Lukas Hensel
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
Worker sorting into tasks and occupations has long been recognized as an important feature of labor markets. But this sorting may be inefficient if jobseekers have inaccurate beliefs about their skills and therefore apply to jobs that do not match their skills. To test this idea, we measure young South African jobseekers’ communication and numeracy skills and their beliefs about their skill levels. Many jobseekers believe they are better at the skill in which they score lower, relative to other jobseekers. These beliefs predict the skill requirements of jobs where they apply. In two field experiments, giving jobseekers their skill …
Salary History And Employer Demand: Evidence From A Two-Sided Audit, Amanda Agan, Bo Cowgill, Laura K. Gee
Salary History And Employer Demand: Evidence From A Two-Sided Audit, Amanda Agan, Bo Cowgill, Laura K. Gee
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates’ disclosures for male and female applicants. Our findings suggest that extra dollars disclosed yield higher salary offers, willingness to pay, and perceptions of outside options by recruiters (all similarly for men and women). Recruiters make negative inferences about the quality and bargaining positions of non-disclosing candidates, though they penalize silent women less.
Co-Enforcement Of Common Pool Resources: Experimental Evidence From Turfs In Chile, Carlos A. Chávez, James J. Murphy, John K. Stranlund
Co-Enforcement Of Common Pool Resources: Experimental Evidence From Turfs In Chile, Carlos A. Chávez, James J. Murphy, John K. Stranlund
ESI Working Papers
This work presents the results of framed field experiments designed to study the co-enforcement of access to common pool resources. The experiments were conducted in the field with participants in the territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs) management scheme that regulates access to nearshore fisheries along the coast of Chile. In the experiments, TURF members not only decided on harvest but also invested in monitoring to deter poaching by outsiders. Treatments varied whether the monitoring investment was an individual decision or determined by a group vote. Per-unit sanctions for poaching were exogenous as if provided by a government authority, and …
Greedy Or Grateful? Asking For More When Thanking Donors, K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong, Subroto Roy
Greedy Or Grateful? Asking For More When Thanking Donors, K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong, Subroto Roy
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Charities routinely send “thank you letters” and small gifts to express gratitude to donors but seek to defray these costs by making additional asks for donations and/or engagement. But the “ask for more” can backfire if potential donors perceive persuasive intent in the expression of gratitude, inducing reactance. We hypothesize that such reactance and its impact on giving will vary by donor loyalty. Loyal donors are more likely to experience reactance to additional asks, muting the feeling of reciprocity aroused by the expression of gratitude to suppress giving. In contrast, non-loyal donors are less likely to experience reactance, and therefore …
Greedy Or Grateful? Asking For More When Thanking Donors, K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong, Subroto Roy
Greedy Or Grateful? Asking For More When Thanking Donors, K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong, Subroto Roy
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Charities often send annual “thank you letters” to express gratitude to donors, but seek to defray these costs by inviting additional donations or engagement. However, the additional asks may backfire if potential donors see the thank you message as “insincere” or “manipulative.” We test this trade-off by conducting a field experiment in cooperation with a leading charity in India. We find that an explicit ask for additional donations or even a request to follow the organization on Facebook reduces giving. However, these effects are not only heterogeneous, but asymmetric by past giving behavior. Recent, frequent, and higher monetary value donors …
Smoothing, Discounting, And Demand For Intra-Household Control For Recipients Of Conditional Cash Transfers, Diego Aycinena, Szabolcs Blazsek, Lucas Rentschler, Betzy Sandoval
Smoothing, Discounting, And Demand For Intra-Household Control For Recipients Of Conditional Cash Transfers, Diego Aycinena, Szabolcs Blazsek, Lucas Rentschler, Betzy Sandoval
Economics and Finance Faculty Publications
Inter-temporal preferences are important determinants of investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Yet, little is known about these preferences for recipients of conditional cash transfers (CCTs). We simultaneously estimate utility curvature (preference for consumption smoothing), discounting, and present biasedness for such recipients. We also introduce a financially motivated method of measuring willingness to forgo funds to control household finances. We find that female participants in a CCT program in Guatemala have very high degrees of utility curvature and low discount factors, which may lead to low levels of investment by participants in the human capital of the household. We …
Evaluating Public Employment Programs With Field Experiments: A Survey Of American Evidence, Christopher J. O'Leary
Evaluating Public Employment Programs With Field Experiments: A Survey Of American Evidence, Christopher J. O'Leary
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
Research in the 1970s based on observational data provided evidence consistent with predictions from economic theory that paying unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to involuntarily jobless workers prolongs unemployment. However, some scholars also reported estimates that the additional time spent in subsidized job search was productive. That is, UI receipt tended to raise reemployment wages after work search among the unemployed. A series of field experiments in the 1980s investigated positive incentives to overcome the work disincentive effects of UI. These were followed by experiments in the 1990s that evaluated the effects of restrictions on UI eligibility through stronger work search …