Research Agenda

Publications

Wage Differences Matter: An Experiment of Social Comparison and Effort Provision when Wages Increase or Decrease with J. Forrest Williams, Games (2020)

Wage rates, efficiency wages, and gift exchange in a labor market are all crucial aspects in regard to designing contracts to ensure high effort from workers. We extend this literature by discussing the relationship between known differences in wages (social comparison) and workers’ effort provision. We conduct an experiment in which subjects perform effort tasks for piece-rates. All subjects are paid the same wage rate in the first half of the experiment, but in the second half are paid different wage rates; the primary variable we study is the information about others’ wage rates given to a subset of subjects. We find that subjects’ efforts respond strongly to information about others’ wages. Such findings have implications for contract structuring for workers

Working Papers

Does the Global South Import Ideology Shifts? Evidence from Costa Rica and CAFTA-DR [PDF]

Has increased access to international markets contributed to political ideology shifts in developing economies? Does ones ex-ante opinion on international trade impact their political leaning after international market access has begun? Previous research has shown that regions impacted negatively by trade have shifted toward political extremes but due to nonexistent regional level information on support for trade, there has been little said about how people’s perception of trade may impact outcomes. Using the unique circumstance of Costa Rica, which placed their decision to join the Free Trade Agreement CAFTA-DR on their populace via a democratic referendum in 2007. I use county-level vote share of support for CAFTA-DR as a proxy of direct opinion on trade. I use political party election manifesto data to rank political leans left-to-right interacted with their received vote share at the county-level to create a county-political-lean index. Assuming that an individuals’ political decision is impacted by the most recent comparative difference, I measure a counties exposure to imports for each election cycle. Results align with previous research and show that increased import competition shifts political support toward right-leaning ideologies. Interestingly, this effect diminishes as support for trade increases. This finding gives further evidence of links between adverse economic shocks to ideological shifts while adding the role of economic agent perception of trade and their interpretation of outcomes from it.

Works in Progress

FDI & Tertiary Human Capital Investment Decisions