Research Symposium

BIO

Im currently a sophomore at Florida State University, pursing a bachelors in economics and international affairs. I am mainly interested in research related to economics, specifically differences in cognitive function due to socioeconomic circumstances. I am also involved in preliminary research concerning retention rates of economic principles among college students. With the research experience gained at Florida State, I will seek a masters in economics and work for an organization devoted to assisting international development. In the long run, I hope to serve as a Foreign Service Officer for the United States.

Turning Down Higher Wages? A Lab-in-Field Experiment on Tax Code Notches and Labor Market Decisions

Abstract

Mani et al. (2013) find that poverty negatively affects cognitive function across different populations. In this paper, we extend their insights into a labor market environment by conducting a lab-in-field experiment in which participants from a student population choose a wage each round and complete a known number of real-effort tasks across static and dynamic environments. In the static environment, subjects choose from a fixed menu of wages across rounds. In the dynamic environment, the menu of wages depends on subjects’ past wage decisions. In both settings, subjects must consider how their wage earnings interact with eligibility for public assistance benefits. Similar to Mani et al., our experimental intervention involves an easy and hard prime and we recruit subjects of both low and high income to test whether poverty affects labor market decision making in this lab-in-field environment. To supplement this analysis, we collect a variety of other measures from participants including executive function measurements of inhibitory control as well as demographic and other background information related to labor market exposure and poverty. We also conduct interviews with a subset of randomly selected participants to gain perspective on their strategy during the experiment and whether the experiment relates to their own experiences navigating the intersection between labor markets and public assistance programs. This research will improve our understanding about how poverty affects decision-making in a labor market environment and may document how incentives created by the phase-out of public assistance benefits can create an obstacle to higher wage earnings.

Keywords: Economics, Labor Market, Social Science