Essays in Behavioral Labor Economics

Abstract

This dissertation includes three chapters in behavioral labor economics. In the first chapter I study with Victoria Lee the effect of wage transparency policies on workplace interactions and workplace choice. We run an online experiment in which we manipulate whether wages are known or secret, and also control the wage allocations that participants faced in the teams. The results show that wage transparency can affect the level of hostility as well as the target of the hostility in the teams -- as measured by a punishment game. These treatment effects are moderated by the level of wage inequality within the teams. We also find that wage transparency can alter which job offers participants accept. This result suggests that wage transparency policies can have general equilibrium effects due to workers changed sorting behavior. We argue that these two sets of results can be explained by the presence of social preferences and participants' inaccurate beliefs about the wage allocations that are corrected when wages are transparent.In the second chapter Nayoung Rim, Roman Rivera, Bocar Ba and myself are studying racial bias within the police. Although there is substantial evidence showing racial bias in firms' hiring decisions, less is known about bias in career recognition. We construct a novel dataset of police award nominations to measure bias against minority employees. Exploiting quasi-random variation in supervisor assignment and randomized timing of annual evaluations, we find that white supervisors are less likely to nominate black officers than white and Hispanic officers leading up to and during the evaluation period. Further, the black-white nomination gap widens with the number of arrests. These patterns suggest that the disparity is not due to in-group favoritism towards white officers but rather bias against black officers. We conduct an online experiment to examine evaluator engagement and find that evaluators are less likely to engage with black officers vs. white officers. Our findings suggest bias in career recognition may have important implications for the black-white promotion gap, the lack of diversity in upper-management positions, and, ultimately, the racial wage gap.In the last chapter I estimate the effects of behavioral interventions on sleep and cognitive performance among undergraduate students. Three interventions are tested during a three-week long framed field experiment: bedtime text reminders, sleep hygiene tips and an educational meditation video. Throughout the experiment participants' sleep patterns are measured using fitness trackers. The results show that sleep quantity and quality may not be easy to move with mild nudges -- although the estimates are noisy due to the small sample size. Estimates with panel data methods support the positive link between sleep and cognitive outcomes.