Experimental Design
The experiment is designed to estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for workplace characteristics in Brazil, specifically focusing on the socio-demographic coworker composition and formal employment status.
The study consists of an online survey with three main components. First, participants answer questions about their socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, race, education, family status, state of residence) and the characteristics of their current job (tenure, wage, hours worked, occupation, size of workplace, signed work card, schedule flexibility, teamwork, lunch with coworkers, work from home option). Additionally, we randomly assign half of the participants to receive information about the costs and benefits of formal employment.
Second, the core experiment builds on the design of Maestas et al. (2023) and presents participants with ten pairs of hypothetical job offers. In each pair, the jobs vary in their wage, the team composition, and in two other selected non-wage attributes (signed work card, schedule flexibility, teamwork, lunch with coworkers, or work from home option). We randomly vary the wage differences between job options by anchoring the wages to the participant's current reported wage. Specifically, we set the wages as multiplicative factors of the current wage that follow a normal distribution centered at 1 with a standard deviation of 0.1 and are truncated to lie between 0.75 and 1.25. The team composition will be signaled through six randomly chosen AI-generated photos of team members. The AI tool manipulates the skin tone of given faces (white, brown, or black), and we will randomly draw the depicted skin tones for each team member.
To account for potential inattention, we include attention checks by presenting choices between two jobs that are exactly the same in all characteristics and asking the participants to select neither. This allows us to estimate and correct for inattention rates in our WTP calculations.
Third, following the job choices, participants complete a detailed questionnaire about workplace interactions, friendship networks, general racial attitudes, beliefs about the benefits of working with same-race colleagues, and experiences of racial discrimination and harassment at work. In addition, we ask participants about which aspect of formality they value most and test their knowledge about formality by asking specific questions regarding the costs and benefits of having a formal contract.
The survey targets 5,000 currently employed workers in Brazil, spanning both formal and informal employees, recruited through an online survey platform.
See pre-analysis plan for details.