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Field
Abstract
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Before
Social scientists have long posited that employment may deliver social and psychological utility beyond the value of income alone. While cross-sectional evidence around this question exists, this literature suffers from challenges of selection and conflation of pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms. This study presents real-world causal estimates of the psychosocial benefits of employment. We address both limitations in the literature by exogenously imposing employment opportunities and including a comparable group that benefits solely from the pecuniary dimension of employment. We run a field experiment in which we randomize 745 individuals of working age into three arms: (1) a control arm, in which no work; (2) a cash arm, in which no work is offered but a large weekly fee is provided; and (3) a work-for-cash arm, in which individuals are offered employment for eight weeks for an equivalent weekly fee. We work with the recently displaced Rohingya refugees who reside in the largest refugee camp in the world upon the southern tip of Bangladesh, and further explore the mediating roles of past exposure to violence and future uncertainty on the psychosocial value of employment.
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After
Social scientists have long posited that employment may deliver psychological utility beyond the value of income alone. Existing literature, however, suffers from problems of selection into employment and an inability to disentangle the pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms driving wellbeing. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial benefits of employment in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. We engage 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: (1) a control arm, in which no work is offered; (2) a cash arm, in which no work is offered but a weekly fee is provided; and (3) a gainful employment arm, in which work is offered and individuals are paid weekly the approximate equivalent of that in the cash arm. Building on existing observations in psychology, we further investigate the causal roles of past trauma and future uncertainty in mediating the impact of employment on psychosocial wellbeing.
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