Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2017
Abstract
Incentives are essential to promote labor productivity. We implemented a two-stage field experiment to measure effects of career and wage incentives on productivity through self-selection and causal effect channels. First, workers were hired with either career or wage incentives. After employment, a random half of workers with career incentives received wage incentives and a random half of workers with wage incentives received career incentives. We find that career incentives attract higher-performing workers than wage incentives but do not increase productivity for existing workers. Instead, wage incentives increase productivity for existing workers. Observable characteristics are limited in explaining the selection effect.
Keywords
Career incentive, wage incentive, internship, self-selection, labor productivity
Discipline
Labor Economics
Research Areas
Applied Microeconomics
Issue
IZA DP No. 10644
First Page
1
Last Page
59
Publisher
IZA DP No. 10644
City or Country
Bonn
Citation
KIM, Hyuncheol Bryant; KIM, Seonghoon; and KIM, Thomas T..
The selection and causal effects of work incentives on labor productivity: Evidence from a two stage randomized controlled trial in Malawi. (2017). 1-59.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2020
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.