Occupational Social Value and Returns to Long Hours

Gicheva, Dora

doi:10.1111/ecca.12322

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The elasticities tend to increase over time but are always lowest for teachers. 6 Occupations in the health care sector and in community and social service also have low elasticity of earnings with respect to hours; Gicheva (2020b) showed that earnings in occupations with high pro-social value tend to change relatively little with hours as workers in these occupations are more likely to donate labor.…”

Section: Elasticity Of Teachers’ Earnings With Respect To Hoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altruism and Burnout: Long Hours in the Teaching Profession

Gicheva¹

2020

ILR Review

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This article explores why many public school teachers work substantially more hours than required by contract, given that the elasticity of their earnings with respect to their hours is close to zero. The author introduces a theoretical framework for public-sector employees in which high levels of effort can indicate either altruism (for intrinsically motivated employees) or low productivity (for low-ability employees). Because intrinsically motivated employees derive higher utility from working in the public sector, they are less likely to exit it. Over time, selection makes high levels of effort more strongly predictive of altruism than of low ability. Findings show that teachers with very low levels of experience exhibit little or no relationship between weekly hours and the probability of remaining in teaching. This correlation becomes more positive as teaching experience increases. Similarly, the level of work hours is positively related to self-reported burnout at low levels of experience, but the relationship is reversed for teachers who have been in the profession longer.

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Section: Elasticity Of Teachers’ Earnings With Respect To Hoursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altruism and Burnout: Long Hours in the Teaching Profession

Gicheva¹

2020

ILR Review

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“…A large literature on the part-time wage penalty focuses on the increasing profile below 40 hours. Some work examines wages associated with long hours, including, for example,Hirsch (2005),Kuhn and Lozano (2008),Michelacci and Pijoan-Mas (2012),Goldin (2014),Weeden et al (2016),Yurdagul (2017),Gicheva (2020),Denning et al (2019),Fuentes and Leamer (2019) andShao et al (2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

Hours and Wages

Bick¹,

Blandin²,

Rogerson³

2022

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We document two robust features of the cross-sectional distribution of usual weekly hours and hourly wages. First, usual weekly hours are heavily concentrated around 40 hours, while at the same time a substantial share of total hours come from individuals who work more than 50 hours. Second, mean hourly wages are non-monotonic across the usual hours distribution, with a peak at 50 hours. We develop and estimate a model of labor supply to account for these features. The novel feature of our model is that earnings are non-linear in hours, with the extent of nonlinearity varying over the hours distribution. Our estimates imply significant wage penalties for individuals that deviate from 40 hours in either direction, leading to a large mass of individuals that work 40 hours and are not very responsive to shocks. This has important implications for the role of labor supply as a mechanism for self-insurance in a standard heterogeneous agent-incomplete markets model and for empirical strategies designed to estimate labor supply parameters.

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“…The more recent research on compensating differentials and job meaning, dominated by case studies and experiments, does not focus on the classic distinction between high- and low-education workers that dominates the survey-based job values research. But recent studies still offer reason to expect higher-educated workers are particularly responsive to the prosocial job amenity: negative pay tradeoffs are identified for elite college graduates (Frank 2010), salaried workers (Gicheva 2020), lawyers (Carnahan, Kryscynski, and Olson 2017), and consultants (Bode, Singh, and Rogan 2015). These consistent findings across different types of highly educated, salaried, and professional workers provide warrant to expect such workers will respond to a prosocial job amenity.…”

Section: Inequality-reducing Prosocial Wage Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium

Wilmers

Zhang²

2022

Am Sociol Rev

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Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings inequality, but through a different channel than generosity. Building on research on job values, we hypothesize that college graduates are more willing than nongraduates to sacrifice pay for prosocial impact. When employers appeal to prosocial values, they can thus disproportionately reduce pay for higher-educated workers. We test this theory with data on online U.S. job postings. We find that prosocial jobs requiring a college degree post lower pay than do standard postings with exactly the same job requirements; prosocial jobs that do not require a college degree, however, pay no differently from other low-education jobs. This gap reduces the aggregate college wage premium by around 5 percent. We present a variety of supplementary evidence using labor market data, worker survey responses, and a vignette experiment with hiring managers. The findings reveal an unintended consequence of employers’ embrace of prosocial values: it offsets macro-level inequality.

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Occupational Social Value and Returns to Long Hours

Cited by 13 publications

References 39 publications

Altruism and Burnout: Long Hours in the Teaching Profession

Altruism and Burnout: Long Hours in the Teaching Profession

Hours and Wages

Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium

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