Home
News
| September 2018 | The research seminar is held every Wednesday, 1.15 – 2.45 p.m., in room LG 0.423. Exceptions: On 21/11/2018 and on 12/12/2018 the event is held in room 4.154! Here you can download the Program NRSE 2018/2019 Fall. |
| 19/12/2018
Room LG 0.423 |
Iris Kesternich (University of Leuven): “Work Meaning, Labor Supply, and Unemployment”
Long-term unemployment imposes large costs on both individuals and society. Reducing long-term unemployment therefore is of first-order importance for public policy. We analyze to what extent work meaning – the significance of a job for others or for society – increases the willingness to accept a job and job performance of employed and unemployed individuals. To this end, we conduct a large-scale online experiment with a representative sample of the population. All of our subjects participate in the “Panel Study of Labour Market and Social Security” (PASS) of the German Labour Agency. In the experiment, we offer a job that can be completed from home. We elicit subjects’ reservation wage for this job through the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism. The treatment variation is the description of the job as having either “high” or “low” meaning. To study heterogeneity in subjects’ reservation wages, we link their behaviour in the experiment to rich survey data provided by PASS.
|