EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Do Informal Transfers Induce Lower Efforts? Evidence from Lab-in-the-Field Experiments in Rural Mexico

Ingela Alger, Laura Juarez, Miriam Juarez and Josepa Miquel-Florensa

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2020, vol. 69, issue 1, 107 - 171

Abstract: How do informal transfers affect work incentives? The question matters in developing countries, where labor markets are intertwined with transfer networks. The tax-and-subsidy component of transfers would dilute work incentives, but their prosocial element could encourage people to work harder. Such crosscurrents are hard to disentangle because participation in informal networks is likely endogenous. We tackle this problem with a lab-in-the-field experiment that uses a real-effort task. Our main finding is that participants do not reduce their effort in the presence of transfers. This suggests that the impact of informal transfers may extend beyond just the sharing of risk.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/702858 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/702858 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Informal Transfers Induce Lower Efforts? Evidence from Lab-in-the-Field Experiments in Rural Mexico (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Do informal transfers induce lower efforts? Evidence from lab-in-the-field experiments in rural Mexico (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Do informal transfers induce lower efforts? Evidence from lab-in-the-field experiments in rural Mexico (2018) Downloads
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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/702858

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/702858