Payday and the Monthly Attention Cycle of Low-Wage Workers

Claire Lelarge

No 21775, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Using linked survey and administrative wage records, we measure workers’ financial monitoring through the accuracy of their self-reported earnings. An unsupervised latent-class model distinguishes transitory reporting errors from rounding behavior and persistent reporting biases, allowing us to interpret lower reporting uncertainty as more precise knowledge of one’s wages. Among low-wage workers, reporting precision exhibits a pronounced pay-cycle pattern: it increases by approximately 12 percent in the days leading up to payday and declines immediately afterward. No comparable pattern emerges among higher-wage workers. These findings suggest that predictable liquidity constraints lead low-wage workers to monitor their personal finances more closely as payday approaches.

Keywords: Attention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 D81 I32 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21775 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cpr:ceprdp:21775

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21775

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().