Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive?*

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kaur, Supreet; Mullainathan, Sendhil; Oh, Suanna; Schilbach, Frank
• 署名单位: National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Paris School of Economics
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjae038
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 635-689
• 关键词: labor-markets; poverty; unemployment; sleep; lives; WORRY

摘要

Workers who are worried about their personal finances may find it hard to focus at work. If so, reducing financial concerns could increase productivity. We test this hypothesis in a sample of low-income Indian piece-rate manufacturing workers. We stagger when wages are paid out: some workers are paid earlier and receive a cash infusion while others remain liquidity constrained. The cash infusion leads workers to reduce their financial concerns by immediately paying off debts and buying household essentials. Subsequently, they become more productive at work: their output increases by 7% (0.11 std. dev.), and they make fewer costly, unintentional mistakes. Workers with more cash on hand thus not only work faster but also more attentively, suggesting improved cognition. These effects are concentrated among more financially constrained workers. We argue that mechanisms such as gift exchange or nutrition cannot account for our results. Instead, our findings suggest that financial strain, at least partly through psychological channels, has the potential to reduce earnings exactly when money is most needed.