brown bag Travail et Économie Publique

Du 09/11/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30

PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09

SCARELLI Thiago (PSE)

Worker’s Preferences over Payment Schedules: Evidence from Ridesharing Drivers

An occupation is usually characterized as a combination of what people do and how much they are paid for it, with little attention to the fact that work arrangements also define when people are paid for their labor. This paper contributes to this discussion by investigating how much value people assign to having a short delay between their tasks and the associated compensation. Using a national experimental survey with ridesharing drivers in Brazil, I document that this population is willing to forgo about 40 percent of their earnings, on average, to receive payment on the same day of their rides, compared to the alternative of being paid with a month's delay. Text analysis methods provide evidence that short delay-to-pay tends to be more critical if working more hours is one's primary adjustment margin in response to financial emergencies. Finally, I provide experimental evidence that increased attention to their domestic budget can make drivers marginally more likely to take up delayed compensation under large multipliers. Those three results suggest that the payment schedule can be a crucial labor market feature for workers under constrained liquidity.