Social ties at work and effort choice: Experimental evidence from Tanzania

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chegere, Martin J.; Falco, Paolo; Menzel, Andreas
• 署名单位: University of Dar es Salaam; University of Copenhagen; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Charles University Prague
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103354
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: firms; hiring; PRODUCTIVITY; social ties; Kinship networks

摘要

Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker's effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they know, while others are paired with strangers. We find that being connected to one's employer does not affect workers' effort on average, but increases the effort of workers without children. Our results are consistent with workers having an altruistic drive in exerting effort when they work for someone they know, which fades away when their valuation of private income becomes stronger.