Sorting and wage premiums in immoral work

Florian Schneider, Fanny Brun and Roberto Weber

No 353, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We use surveys, laboratory experiments and administrative data to study how heterogeneity in the perceived immorality of work and in workers’ aversion to acting immorally impact labor market outcomes. Immoral work is associated with higher wages, both in administrative data and in causal experimental evidence. Individuals more willing to engage in immoral conduct find employment in firms and industries perceived as immoral less aversive and have higher employment rates in immoral work in the laboratory. These phenomena appear to be driven by impure social motives, reflecting a desire not to be involved with immoral work, rather than by consequentialist concerns.

Keywords: Wage premium; immoral behavior; impure social preferences; sorting; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D03 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06, Revised 2024-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/188475/7/econwp353.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sorting and Wage Premiums in Immoral Work (2020)
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:zur:econwp:353

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().