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Project

Work meaning and labour supply - a large scale experiment

One problem unemployed individuals may face is that they are offered jobs with low wages, and also with low work meaning, thus with low the significance of a job for others or for society. In this project, we study how important work meaning is for the decision to take up a job. To test the relative importance of work meaning and monetary incentives for the decision to accept employment, we conduct a large-scale online experiment with a representative sample of employed and unemployed individuals. We offer subjects a job and measure their reservation wage. The treatment variation is the meaning of work. All of our subjects participate in the Panel Study Labor Market and Social Security commissioned by the Institute for Employment Research of the German Federal Employment Agency. Hence, we can link subjects’ behavior in the experiment to rich survey and administrative data.

Date:1 Jan 2018 →  31 Dec 2021
Keywords:Unemployment, Work meaning
Disciplines:Applied economics