PSE Internal Seminar

Du 22/03/2024 de 12:00 à 13:00

GUYON Nina(ENS-PSL and PSE)
KRANTON Rachel(PSE)

"On-the-job Effort: workers’ identity, sharing organization values, and mental health" joint with Duncan Thomas

Why do workers exert effort at their tasks and what are the implications for workers when particularly high effort is needed to do their jobs? Given the absence of incentive pay or threat of job loss, this study of university employees during the Covid-19 pandemic provides strong evidence of a connection between identity and workers’ effort. The study further finds associations between identity, effort, employees’ relationship to the organization, and employee mental health. The study sample consists of about 4000 respondents to an institution-wide survey conducted in the spring of 2021. Employees whose work is more important to their sense of self report exerting significantly more effort to maintain their level of accomplishment relative to a pre-pandemic benchmark. Higher effort needed to accomplish tasks, however, is strongly associated with higher levels of stress and anxiety. Employees who agree more that the university shares their values report needing less effort to accomplish tasks and report lower levels of stress and anxiety. We thus identify workers with a constellation of features: greater importance of work to sense of self, less sharing of values with the organization, higher self-reported effort, and higher levels of mental health distress. The stress and anxiety measures pick up patterns not seen in a broader, widely used scale of psychosocial well-being, indicating the need for new, intentional measures to study the relationship between work and employee mental health....................................................................................................................This paper studies the effects of a desegregation shock induced by middle school closures in deprived neighborhoods and leading to the reallocation of students to other middle schools in the city. I analyze the direct effects on students from deprived neighborhoods (the “movers”), as well as the indirect effects on incumbent students in receiving schools (the “receivers”). In both cases, I make use of the staggered closure of middle schools in cities all over France, comparing cohorts before and after closure, as well as of the availability of control cities. Exhaustive administrative panel data at the student level allow me to account for potential selection of the movers into receiving middle schools as well as for a potential “rich flight” of the receivers. I find that a school closure leads to a decrease in dropout rates after middle school for movers. These effects are consistent with a strong decrease in disruption that outweighs potential negative effects. Importantly, dropout rates also decrease for receivers, consistent with strong positive ranking effects that outweigh potential disruption effects. I find evidence of a “rich flight” towards the private system only for socially advantaged receivers that cannot fully explain these positive effects. Finally, I study the dynamics of these effects.