CAREER: Labor Productivity in Poor Countries

劳动生产率的差异解释了不同国家和国家内家庭之间的收入和生活水平的差异。虽然低劳动生产率是贫困及其传递给后代的原因，但经济学家对穷人劳动生产率低的原因知之甚少。这项研究项目将结合心理学和经济学的见解、复杂的经济理论和实验方法来研究穷人劳动生产率低下的根源和后果。本实验研究将在三个不同的环境中进行，从而使结果具有普适性。这三个项目都将试图回答一个具体的发展问题：个人的劳动生产率，人们储蓄和平稳消费的能力，以及经济中的总生产率。这项研究的结果将有助于更好地理解低收入人群劳动生产率低下的根源。通过这样做，研究结果可以为提高生产率的政策提供强有力的投入，从而减少美国和世界各地的贫困。这也可能导致劳动生产率的提高，经济更快的增长，以及美国公民生活水平的提高。这项研究项目推进了发展和行为经济学的文献。该提案包括三个项目。每个项目都将缺失的市场与低收入环境下的生产率扭曲联系在一起。第一个项目测试再分配安排是否会抑制劳动力供应和生产率。再分配安排被认为是对缺失的保险市场的回应。它将利用一项实地试验来检验，使工人能够将收入增长转化为长期储蓄，是否会导致工人产出和收入的增加。这将为自然场环境中再分配压力的这种扭曲效应提供第一个证据。第二个项目试图为认知约束对消费平滑的作用提供第一条证据，帮助解释违反永久收入假说的原因。它使用现场实验来测试降低规划认知成本的干预措施是否会改善消费、平滑和产出。第三个项目通过直接测试劳动力配给是否是要素错配的原因，推进了关于分离失败和要素错配的发展文献。这些项目中的每一个都突显了缺失市场的存在如何可能加剧欠发达。通过利用经济学和心理学的洞察力，这项研究将能够通过仅通过任何一个学科都不可能实现的新的调查领域来扩大我们对贫困原因和后果的理解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Labor productivity differences explain differences in income and living standards across countries and families within countries. While low labor productivity is the cause of poverty and its transmission to future generation, economists know very little about the causes of low labor productivity among the poor. This research project will combine insights from psychology and economics, sophisticated economic theory, and experimental methods to study the sources and consequences of low labor productivity among the poor. This experimental research will be carried out in three different settings, thus making the results generalizable. Each of the three projects will try to answer a specific development question: individual's labor productivity, people's ability to save and smooth out consumption, and total productivity in the economy. The results of this research will provide a better understanding of the sources of low labor productivity among low income people. In so doing, the results could provide powerful inputs into policies to increase productivity, hence decrease poverty in the U.S. and around the world. This could also lead to increased labor productivity, faster economic growth, and improved living standards for U.S. citizens.This research project advances the literatures in development and behavioral economics. The proposal consists of three projects. Each project links missing markets to distortions in productivity in a low income setting. The first project tests whether redistributive arrangements, considered a response to missing insurance markets, dampen labor supply and productivity. It will use a field experiment to examine whether enabling workers to convert earnings gains into long run savings, leads to increases in worker output and earnings. This would provide the first evidence for such distortive effects of redistributive pressure in a natural field setting. The second project seeks to provide the first piece of evidence for the role of cognitive constraints on consumption smoothening, helping to explain violations of the permanent income hypothesis. It uses a field experiment to test whether interventions that lower the cognitive costs of planning improve consumption smoothing and output. The third project advances the development literature on both separation failures and factor misallocation by directly testing whether labor rationing is a cause of factor misallocation. Each of these projects highlight how the presence of missing markets can exacerbate underdevelopment. By leveraging insights from both economics and psychology, this research will enable work that expands our understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty through new frontiers of inquiry that are not possible through any one discipline alone.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.