Self-Control and the Development of Work Arrangements

By Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, Sendhil Mullainathan. The American Economic Review, 2010

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A significant part of the development experience is the change in the way work is structured. To use a historical example, the Industrial Revolution involved workers moving from agriculture to manufacturing; from working on their own to working with others in factories; and from flexible work-hours to rigid work-days. How are we to understand these changes? Why did they occur? What impacts did they have on labor productivity and possibly growth? In answering questions such as these, economic theories draw on different assumptions about aggregate production, market failures, and innovation. Yet almost all rely on one of two determinants of labor productivity: human capital and incentives. Human capital theories (broadly construed) emphasize how work arrangements utilize the distribution of human capital and, in learning models, facilitate its development. Incentive theories (again broadly construed) emphasize how workplace arrangements align worker payoffs to minimize moral hazard. In this paper, we bring together and advance a growing literature on a third feature: worker self-control. Individuals may not be able to work as hard as they would like. Some workplace arrangements may make self-control problems more severe, while others may ameliorate them. Below, we describe evidence from a field experiment broadly supportive of the selfcontrol perspective. We then argue that many work arrangements can be understood differently through this perspective. Specifically, we

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f4408fbbc91db2a42a2935511ceab41520320c9

Citations in the corpus

• Working over Time: Dynamic Inconsistency in Real Effort Tasks (2015, unknown): “Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan (2010) use disproportionate effort response on paydays to make inference on dynamic inconsistency and link this behavior to demand for thoughtfully taken into account in some studies.”
• Locus of control and the labor market (2015, unknown): “…(e.g., Thaler and Shefrin 1981; Shefrin and Thaler 1988; Levin 1998), criminal behavior (Lee and McCray 2005), overeating (Ruhm 2012), consumer pricing decisions (Esteban et al. 2007), welfare receipt (Chan 2014), and worker compensation (Kaur et al. 2010, 2011; Parsons and Van Wesep 2013).”
• Peer Effects in the Workplace (2017, unknown): “Such shocks turn out to be important: When adding time-varying firm fixed effects ( 𝛿 𝑗𝑡 in equation (4)) in column (3), we find that a 10% increase in peer quality raises individual wages by merely 0.1%.”
• Money, depletion, and prosociality in the dictator game (2015, unknown): “For instance, Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan (2010) argue that diminished self-control might decrease worker performance in firms, and Cooper and Sutter (2011) point out that ego depletion might decrease performance in teams.”
• The Economic Consequences of 'Brain Drain' of the Best and Brightest: Microeconomic Evidence from Five Countries (2010, unknown): “Similarly credible evidence of productivity spillovers in workplaces is mainly limited to single low-skilled occupations where data on effort and output are reliably measured, such as check-out (Mas and Moretti, 2009) and data entry (Kaur et al., 2010) operators.”
• Self-Control at Work (2015, unknown): “…2 is whether the contract treatments affect production and earnings. self-control at work 1251 devices that reduce the need for dominated contracts could also vary across days ðsee, e.g., Kaur et al. 2010Þ. Table 4 presents treatment effects of giving workers the option to choose targets.”