Willingness to Pay for Formal Job Attributes: A Discrete Choice Experiment In Colombian Mom-and-Dad Stores (with Catalina Franco)
Informal workers in low- and middle-income countries are vulnerable to economic shocks since their jobs lack health and retirement benefits. Are workers informal because they do not value these benefits offered by formal jobs? Using a discrete choice experiment on a random sample of 2,900 "mom-and-dad" store owners and employees in Colombia, we estimate their willingness to pay (WTP) for formal jobs benefits, namely health and retirement plans. We find that, on average, workers are willing to forego up to 28% and 37% of their earnings to access formal health and retirement benefits, respectively. In contrast to previous research, which suggests that workers’ low WTP for benefits induced them to become informal under expansions of free or subsidized health insurance programs, our WTP estimations suggest that workers actually highly value these benefits.
We propose a laboratory experiment to understand how social exclusion affects the participants of this antisocial interaction in terms of performance and reported emotions. We adopt a widely used ostracism manipulation from psychology and take it to an experimental economics laboratory. We find that social exclusion events only affect lightly excluded participants and that this effect is explained by the emotions generated after exclusion. In addition, the victims of exclusion report reductions in the valence dimension of emotions, as do those who have the option to exclude but decide not to. The possibility of bystanders punishing potential offenders, the generalized disapproval of exclusion, and an extended approval of inclusion reduce the incidence of exclusion. This reduction comes at the cost of negative changes in the reported emotions of most participant types, but it does not translate into changes in performance in a task. Last, we find that previous exclusion increases the decision of former victims to ostracize.
We propose a lab experiment to understand if environments of resource restrictions and uncertainty on the relative needs of future beneficiaries affect physicians' resource allocation decisions and how. When there are incentives to over-treat, we find that a patient tended by a constrained physician under uncertainty obtains higher benefits and receives allocations closer to her optimum than patients from physicians with no constraints or deciding under uncertainty alone. In addition, we observe a redistribution of resources when physicians decide with resource restrictions and uncertainty. In particular, when resources are scarce, physicians tend to allocate limited services to patients with higher benefits in the absence of medical services, a higher capacity to benefit from the resources, the scantiest need for service units, and the lowest benefits at the optimum. Finally, we find that constraints, with or without complete information on patient characteristics, lead selfish physicians to approximate what is best for the patient.
I propose an experimental design to analyze the role of female and male leaders in encouraging other-regarding behavior in the workplace as a way of reducing gender gaps in labor outcomes. In addition to the sex of the leader, I also study how the gender composition of a group and the selection of a leader via merit favor the adoption of a communal (other-regarding) norm. I find that although female leaders are more likely than male leaders to select communal compensation, followers are more likely to endorse it when men suggest it. In particular, women are less likely to accept the communal standard if proposed by meritocratically elected female rather than male leaders. Conversely, men are less likely to support this norm in female rather than male-majority groups when leaders are not selected because of merit.
Maternal health complications at delivery: Evidence from OBGYN services' closures in Colombia (with Camila Galindo and Susana Otálvaro-Ramírez)
Addressing Obstetric Violence: Diagnosis and Intervention Design for Healthcare Professionals in Medellín, Colombia (with Camila Galindo, Mariantonia Lemos, and Helena Díaz)
Using Media to Modify Care Norms and Time Distribution within the Household (with Verónica Abril, Manuel Rojas, and Yuliet Verbel)