Three Essays on Job-Trainee and Employee Behavior:Experimental Evidence from Malawi.

Employment Risk;Job Performance;Malawi;Randomized Controlled Trial;Economics;Business;Public Policy and Economics

Godlonton, SusanLam, David A. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Employment Risk;    Job Performance;    Malawi;    Randomized Controlled Trial;    Economics;    Business;    Public Policy and Economics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/100021/susgod_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In the first chapter I examine the relationship between employment risk and job seeker performance. To induce exogenous variation in employment risk, I randomize outside options for job seekers undergoing a real recruitment process. I do this by assigning job seekers a 0, 1, 5, 50, 75 or 100 percent chance of real alternative employment of the same duration and wage as the jobs for which they are applying. I find that job seeker performance is highest and effort is lowest among those assigned the lowest employment risk (a guaranteed alternative job), and performance is lowest and effort highest among those facing the highest employment risk (those without any job guarantee). My findings are consistent with a framework that ties together insights from economics and psychology; performance is an increasing function of effort and an inverse u-shaped function of stress. In the second chapter I exploit the experiment used in chapter one and estimate the employment and wage effects of a short term job.I find the following key results. First, there is a 10.6 to 13.9 percentage point increase in average employment during the eight months following the job. Second, there is a sizeable increase in wages. Individuals earn approximately 60 to 67 percent more per day. There is suggestive evidence that individuals are switching into different occupations particularly clerical and related work away from agricultural based activities. Lastly, the estimated returns to the job are larger among those who perform worst on a high stakes numeracy and literacy test.In the third chapter, examines corrupt behavior by interviewer employees working on short term contracts in a developing country. Specifically, I measure how employees change the extent to which they steal from the firm in response to varying degrees of monitoring in the work force. I find that decreasing the monitoring rate by ten percentage points increases the likelihood of money being stolen by approximately four percentage points; and the amount stolen by between five and eight percent on baseline theft. I also observe the relationship between the monitoring rate and employee crime to be non-linear.