IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/osfxxx/q2x8d.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Beliefs and selection in formal and informal labor markets: an experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Esteban, Steffanny Romero
  • Mantilla, Cesar

Abstract

We create a dual labor market in the laboratory with participants selecting where to perform a real effort task: one with higher piece-rate and taxed labor income, resembling a formal market; or another without tax contributions, resembling an informal one. Although the tax revenue is divided among all participants, regardless of their chosen market, our parameterization yields two coordination equilibria. We thus explore whether feedback regarding labor market composition (i.e., how many group-mates chose each market) and relative earnings in each market increase the selection of the formal labor market. This feedback increases the choice of the formal labor market by six percentage points (from 64% to 70%) and increases the accuracy of beliefs regarding labor market composition. Informing the average earnings in both markets seems to work as a focal point that increases participation in the formal market.

Suggested Citation

  • Esteban, Steffanny Romero & Mantilla, Cesar, 2022. "Beliefs and selection in formal and informal labor markets: an experiment," OSF Preprints q2x8d, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:q2x8d
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/q2x8d
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/62729cba1e229b12aa88fb62/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/q2x8d?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roger B. Myerson, 2009. "Learning from Schelling's Strategy of Conflict," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(4), pages 1109-1125, December.
    2. Maloney, William F., 2004. "Informality Revisited," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 32(7), pages 1159-1178, July.
    3. Rosenzweig, Mark R., 1988. "Labor markets in low-income countries," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Hollis Chenery & T.N. Srinivasan (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 713-762, Elsevier.
    4. Lazear, Edward P & Rosen, Sherwin, 1981. "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(5), pages 841-864, October.
    5. Armin Falk & Anke Becker & Thomas Dohmen & Benjamin Enke & David Huffman & Uwe Sunde, 2018. "Global Evidence on Economic Preferences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 133(4), pages 1645-1692.
    6. Ernesto Dal Bó & Pedro Dal Bó & Erik Eyster, 2018. "The Demand for Bad Policy when Voters Underappreciate Equilibrium Effects," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(2), pages 964-998.
    7. Gerxhani, Klarita & Schram, Arthur, 2006. "Tax evasion and income source: A comparative experimental study," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 402-422, June.
    8. Alm, James & Cherry, Todd & Jones, Michael & McKee, Michael, 2010. "Taxpayer information assistance services and tax compliance behavior," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 577-586, August.
    9. Uri Gneezy & Muriel Niederle & Aldo Rustichini, 2003. "Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(3), pages 1049-1074.
    10. Mathieu Lefebvre & Pierre Pestieau & Arno Riedl & Marie Villeval, 2015. "Tax evasion and social information: an experiment in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 22(3), pages 401-425, June.
    11. Tor Eriksson & Sabrina Teyssier & Marie‐Claire Villeval, 2009. "Self‐Selection And The Efficiency Of Tournaments," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 47(3), pages 530-548, July.
    12. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk, 2011. "Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 556-590, April.
    13. Matthias Sutter & Stefan Haigner & Martin G. Kocher, 2010. "Choosing the Carrot or the Stick? Endogenous Institutional Choice in Social Dilemma Situations," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 77(4), pages 1540-1566.
    14. Pedro Dal Bo & Andrew Foster & Louis Putterman, 2010. "Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(5), pages 2205-2229, December.
    15. Fischbacher, Urs & Gachter, Simon & Fehr, Ernst, 2001. "Are people conditionally cooperative? Evidence from a public goods experiment," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 397-404, June.
    16. Mehta, Judith & Starmer, Chris & Sugden, Robert, 1994. "The Nature of Salience: An Experimental Investigation of Pure Coordination Games," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(3), pages 658-673, June.
    17. James Alm, 2012. "Measuring, explaining, and controlling tax evasion: lessons from theory, experiments, and field studies," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 19(1), pages 54-77, February.
    18. James Alm & Antoine Malézieux, 2021. "40 years of tax evasion games: a meta-analysis," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(3), pages 699-750, September.
    19. Bulow, Jeremy I & Summers, Lawrence H, 1986. "A Theory of Dual Labor Markets with Application to Industrial Policy,Discrimination, and Keynesian Unemployment," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 4(3), pages 376-414, July.
    20. Alm, James & Jacobson, Sarah, 2007. "Using Laboratory Experimentsin Public Economics," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 60(1), pages 129-152, March.
    21. Armin Falk & Anke Becker & Thomas Dohmen & Benjamin Enke & David B. Huffman & Uwe Sunde, 2017. "Global Evidence on Economic Preferences," NBER Working Papers 23943, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    22. Choo, C.Y. Lawrence & Fonseca, Miguel A. & Myles, Gareth D., 2016. "Do students behave like real taxpayers in the lab? Evidence from a real effort tax compliance experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 102-114.
    23. Erkal, Nisvan & Gangadharan, Lata & Koh, Boon Han, 2018. "Monetary and non-monetary incentives in real-effort tournaments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 528-545.
    24. Grundmann, Susanna & Graf Lambsdorff, Johann, 2017. "How income and tax rates provoke cheating – An experimental investigation of tax morale," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 27-42.
    25. Dan Lovallo & Colin Camerer, 1999. "Overconfidence and Excess Entry: An Experimental Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(1), pages 306-318, March.
    26. Chen, Daniel L. & Schonger, Martin & Wickens, Chris, 2016. "oTree—An open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field experiments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(C), pages 88-97.
    27. Benndorf, Volker & Rau, Holger A. & Sölch, Christian, 2019. "Minimizing learning in repeated real-effort tasks," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 239-248.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mantilla, Cesar & Rincón, Ferley, 2022. "Mobility and productivity in a dual labor market: an experiment," OSF Preprints 5as84, Center for Open Science.
    2. Alice Guerra & Brooke Harrington, 2023. "Regional variation in tax compliance and the role of culture," Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, Springer;Fondazione Edison, vol. 40(1), pages 139-152, April.
    3. Kenju Kamei & Thomas Markussen, 2023. "Free Riding and Workplace Democracy—Heterogeneous Task Preferences and Sorting," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(7), pages 3884-3904, July.
    4. Dutcher, E. Glenn & Balafoutas, Loukas & Lindner, Florian & Ryvkin, Dmitry & Sutter, Matthias, 2015. "Strive to be first or avoid being last: An experiment on relative performance incentives," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 39-56.
    5. Cingl, Lubomír & Lichard, Tomáš & Miklánek, Tomáš, 2023. "Tax designation effects on compliance: An online experiment with taxpayers," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 214(C), pages 615-633.
    6. James Alm, 2019. "What Motivates Tax Compliance?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 353-388, April.
    7. Colin C. Williams, 2023. "A Modern Guide to the Informal Economy," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 18668.
    8. Emmanuel Dechenaux & Dan Kovenock & Roman Sheremeta, 2015. "A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(4), pages 609-669, December.
    9. Loukas Balafoutas & E. Glenn Dutcher & Florian Lindner & Dmitry Ryvkin, 2017. "The Optimal Allocation Of Prizes In Tournaments Of Heterogeneous Agents," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 55(1), pages 461-478, January.
    10. Raphael Guber & Martin G. Kocher & Joachim Winter, 2021. "Does having insurance change individuals' self‐confidence?," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 88(2), pages 429-442, June.
    11. De Paola, Maria & Gioia, Francesca & Scoppa, Vincenzo, 2018. "The adverse consequences of tournaments: Evidence from a field experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 1-18.
    12. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk, 2011. "Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 556-590, April.
    13. Bradler, Christiane, 2015. "How creative are you? An experimental study on self-selection in a competitive incentive scheme for creative performance," ZEW Discussion Papers 15-021, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    14. Charness, Gary & Kuhn, Peter, 2011. "Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 3, pages 229-330, Elsevier.
    15. Kovacs, Roxanne & Dunaiski, Maurice & Galizzi, Matteo M. & Grimalda, Gianluca & Hortala-Vallve, Rafael & Murtin, Fabrice & Putterman, Louis, 2024. "The determinants of trust: findings from large, representative samples in six OECD countries," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 124608, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Thomas Markussen & Ernesto Reuben & Jean‐Robert Tyran, 2014. "Competition, Cooperation and Collective Choice," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 124(574), pages 163-195, February.
    17. Bühren, Christoph & Dannenberg, Astrid, 2021. "The demand for punishment to promote cooperation among like-minded people," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    18. Alt, Marius, 2024. "Better us later than me now —," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    19. Ho Fai Chan & Uwe Dulleck & Jonas Fooken & Naomi Moy & Benno Torgler, 2023. "Cash and the Hidden Economy: Experimental Evidence on Fighting Tax Evasion in Small Business Transactions," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 185(1), pages 89-114, June.
    20. Lubomir Cingl & Tomas Lichard & Tomas Miklanek, 2022. "Mist Over a Meadow: Tax Designation Effects on Compliance," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp725, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:q2x8d. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://osf.io/preprints/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.