Social ties at work and effort choice: experimental evidence from Tanzania

0577822 - NHÚ 2024 RIV CZ eng V - Research Report
Chegere, M. - Falco, P. - Menzel, Andreas
Social ties at work and effort choice: experimental evidence from Tanzania.
Prague: CERGE-EI, 2023. 35 s. CERGE-EI Working Paper Series, 763. ISSN 2788-0443
Institutional support: RVO:67985998
Keywords : firms * hiring * productivity
OECD category: Applied Economics, Econometrics
https://cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp763.pdf

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.

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0346918