Abstract
The working poor in low-income countries are exposed to challenging working conditions. Accidents, pollution and heat lead to work-related illness and mortality rates that are four to five times higher in low-income countries compared to their wealthier counterparts. Moreover, the high prevalence of occupational hazards comes at psychosocial costs for workers in the form of stress, anxiety, burnout, or depression. As a consequence, the cost of labour supply for the poor can be excessively high and may lead to the existence of a poverty trap caused by challenging working conditions. In this research project, I design a randomized controlled trial to study how daily exposure to challenging working conditions affects the economic and social well-being of the poor. Focusing on the informal waste industry of Uganda, a labor market with especially dangerous working conditions, I randomly vary workers’ access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and estimate the causal effect of improved workplace amenities on a wide range of economic and psychosocial outcomes. In addition, I conduct a series of willingness-to-pay and job offer experiments to measure how improvements to working conditions are valued and affect reservation wages of workers.