Publications

How Does Working-Time Flexibility Affect Workers' Productivity in a Routine Job? Evidence from a Field Experiment, with Bart Cockx, Luz Magdalena Salas, and Ana Maria Diaz, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2022

We conducted an experiment in which we hired workers under different types of contracts to evaluate how flexible working time affects on-the-job productivity in a routine job. Our approach breaks down the global impact on productivity into sorting and behavioral effects. We find that all forms of working-time flexibility reduce the length of workers’ breaks. For part-time work, these positive effects are globally counterbalanced. Yet arrangements that allow workers to decide when to start and stop working increase global productivity by as much as 50 percent, 40 percent of which is induced by sorting.

Is Informal Redistribution Costly? Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in Senegal, with Karine Marazyan and Paola Villar, The World Bank Economic Review, Volume 34, Supplement_1, 2020

In Sub-Saharan Africa, individuals frequently transfer a substantial share of their resources to members of their social networks. Social pressure to redistribute, however, can induce disincentive effects on resource allocation decisions. This paper measures and characterizes the costs of redistributive pressure by estimating individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) to hide their income. The study estimates a social tax due to informal redistribution of 10 percent. Moreover, it shows that individuals are willing to escape from the redistributive pressure exerted mainly by extended family members.

Income Hiding and Information Redistribution: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in Senegal, with Karine Marazyan and Paola Villar, Journal of Development Economics, 2019, Vol. 137

This paper estimates the hidden cost of informal redistribution in a context where people heavily rely on their social networks and have limited access to financial markets. It is based on a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in Senegal which has the unique feature of combining a small scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) and a lab experiment. The lab component allows us to estimate the cost of this informal redistribution, through the elicitation of the willingness-to-pay to hide income and to identify the relevant population: two thirds of the experiment participants are willing to forgo up to 14% of their gains to keep them private. Based on the RCT component, we find that giving the opportunity to hide allows people to decrease by 27% the share of the gains they devote to transfers to kin out of the lab and to reallocate this extra money to health and personal expenses. This is the first paper to both identify the cost of this informal redistribution and to relate it to real-life resource allocation decisions, in a controlled setting.

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