Moral consequences of becoming unemployed

Barr, Abigail; Miller, Luis; Ubeda, Paloma

Abstract

We test the conjecture that becoming unemployed erodes the extent to which a person acknowledges earned entitlement. We use behavioral experiments to generate incentive compatible measures of individuals’ tendencies to acknowledge earned entitlement and incorporate these experiments in a two-stage study. In the first stage, participants’ acknowledgement of earned entitlement was measured by engaging them in the behavioral experiments and their individual employment status and other relevant socio-economic characteristics were recorded. In the second stage, a year later, the process was repeated using the same instruments. The combination of the experimentally generated data and the longitudinal design allows us to investigate our conjecture using a difference-in-difference approach, while ruling out the pure self-interest confound. We report evidence consistent with a large, negative effect of becoming unemployed on the acknowledgement of earned entitlement.

Citation

Barr, A., Miller, L., & Ubeda, P. (2016). Moral consequences of becoming unemployed. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(17), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521250113

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 7, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Apr 11, 2016
• Publication Date: Apr 26, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 30, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 30, 2016
• Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
• Print ISSN: 0027-8424
• Electronic ISSN: 1091-6490
• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 113
• Issue: 17
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521250113
• Keywords: Economic experiments; Longitudinal data; Distributive justice; Redistribution; Unemployment
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/783662
• Publisher URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/05/1521250113.abstract