Social Ties at Work and Effort Choice: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

Martin Chegere, Paolo Falco and Andreas Menzel

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker’s effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they are socially connected with, while others are paired with strangers. With a design that is sufficiently powered to detect economically meaningful effects, we find that being socially connected to one’s employer does not affect workers’ effort.

Keywords: firms; hiring; productivity; social ties; kinship networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M51 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp763

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