Experimental Design Details
We will sample respondents who are:
+ Living in the U.S.,
+ Ages 22-65,
+ Not a student,
+ College-educated,
+ Fluent in English,
+ Have not done a previous pilot with us,
+ Their main job is a full-time, non-Prolific job where they are
>> Working at least 30 hours per week,
>> Earning at least $10k annually,
>> Either a private sector or government employee (i.e., not self-employed, working without pay for family business/farm, or other type of worker).
The sample will be balanced to be 50% male and 50% female. We will use Prolific’s bot detection and replace individuals in our sample who are detected as bots with new respondents.
WORKER RENTS: We plan to measure worker rents – the amount of wages a worker is willing to forgo in order to stay at their current job – using hypothetical discrete choice experiments (Mas & Pallais, 2017). Specifically, we will ask them both whether they expect to leave their current job within T months, and whether they would expect to leave their current job if it paid X% more or less than it currently does. We will randomize T between {3,6}. Among respondents who currently plan to remain at their current job we will randomize X between {-1,-3,-5,-7,-10,-13,-16,-20,-25}; among respondents who currently plan to leave their current job we will randomize X between {1,3,5,7,10,13,16,20,25}. We will also ask workers for the wage increase/decrease at which they would be indifferent about leaving their current job.
RENT SHARING: We will also use the survey to measure firms’ willingness to increase wages in order to retain workers. Specifically, we will elicit workers’ beliefs about whether their firm would raise their wages by Y%, if doing so was necessary to retain them. Across respondents, we will randomly vary Y from {1,3,5,7,10,13,16,20,25}. We will ask respondents for the maximal pay rise that their employer would give them, in order to retain them.
Other questions in our survey include demographic questions, questions on how their current wage was set, and attention checks.