Picture This: Social Distance and the Mistreatment of Migrant Workers

Toman Barsbai, Vojtěch Bartoš, Victoria Licuanan, Andreas Steinmayr, Erwin Tiongson and Dean Yang

No 30804, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: International migrant workers are vulnerable to abuses by their employers. We implemented a randomized controlled trial of an intervention to reduce mistreatment of Filipino women working as domestic workers (DWs) by their household employers in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia. The intervention -- encouraging DWs to show their employers a photo of their family while providing a small gift when starting employment -- caused DWs to experience less mistreatment, have higher satisfaction with the employer, and be more likely to stay with the employer. DWs' families in the Philippines also come to view international labor migration more positively, while they generally remain unaware of the intervention. An online experiment with potential employers in Hong Kong and the Middle East suggests that a mechanism behind the treatment effect is a reduction in the employer's perceived social distance from the employee.

JEL-codes: J50 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-sea
Note: DEV LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30804.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Picture This: Social Distance and the Mistreatment of Migrant Workers (2022)
Working Paper: Picture This: Social Distance and the Mistreatment of Migrant Workers (2022)
Working Paper: Picture this: Social distance and the mistreatment of migrant workers (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30804

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().