Conference Agenda

This paper quantifies how much people would be willing to pay to remove frictions that prevent them from working their ideal number of hours using two sufficient statistics: (1) the percentage difference between ideal and actual hours and (2) the Hicksian elasticity of ideal hours with respect to the after-tax wage rate. We estimate willingness-to-pay to remove these frictions in the U.S. and Germany. Three core findings emerge: (1) adjustment frictions—including fixed costs, discrete choice sets, and search costs—are costly for any reasonable value of the Hicksian elasticity, even when accounting for endogenous wages, multiple labor supply decisions, and dynamics; (2) the cumulative cost of adjustment frictions and tax misperceptions is even larger, with individuals willing to pay at least 10% of their income on average to remove both; and (3) adjustment frictions are much costlier than tax misperceptions.

We provide experimental evidence on how employers adjust expectations to automation risk in high-skill, white-collar work. Using a randomized information intervention among tax advisors in Germany, we show that firms systematically underestimate automatability. Information provision raises risk perceptions, especially for routine-intensive roles. Yet, it leaves short-run hiring plans unchanged. Instead, updated beliefs increase revenue and profit expectations without wage adjustments, implying limited rent-sharing. Employers also anticipate new tasks in legal tech, compliance, and AI interaction, and report higher training and adoption intentions. Our findings reveal how employer beliefs shape anticipatory responses to technological change.

Cash transfers are the world's most common poverty alleviation policy. While effective at short-term poverty alleviation, the standard economic view is that they reduce incentives to work, and thus increase long-run poverty. I study this trade-off by measuring the effect of an exogenous increase in Brazil's main cash transfer on the labour supply of men and women. I find no effect for men, while women increase their labour supply by 7.4%. This is driven by mothers, for whom the transfer relaxes childcare constraints, enabling them to join the labour force. Leveraging discontinuities on the allocation of education funds to Brazil's 5570 municipalities, I find that the effect is stronger in areas receiving more education funds. Overall, my paper illustrates that there is no trade-off between short-term relief and long-term poverty reduction. Rather, cash transfers encourage women's labour force participation, particularly when complementary public goods, such as educational facilities, are available.

We provide evidence on the impacts of job loss among female factory workers in Ethiopia and on how these impacts can be mitigated. We leverage quasi-experimental variation in job loss, experimental variation in job-loss support payments, and high-frequency data spanning a period of 13 months after displacement. We find that job loss is a persistent shock that reduces employment and consumption spending for longer than one year, and almost doubles the rate of poverty. An additional lump-sum payment encourages early spending and reduces both overall and manufacturing employment. In contrast, providing an equivalent amount in monthly tranches -- a payment modality preferred by a majority of workers -- enables workers to better smooth consumption expenditures without negative employment effects. We show that workers have high willingness to pay for additional job-loss insurance, but also heterogeneous preferences over the payment modality. This generates a key trade-off between workers' private welfare and the government industrialization objectives.