Remy Beauregard

Studies of meaningful work often compare tasks that are more meaningful on average, or workers who report more or less meaning. In an online experiment with 832 US workers, I offer two framings of the same image description task, one prosocial and one neutral, elicit each worker's perception of how meaningful each is, classify workers from four incentivized choices between them, and then randomly assign tasks and pay across four work rounds. The prosocial framing is rated 6.23 points more meaningful on average, but 26.1% of workers rate the neutral framing higher. Random assignment to the prosocial framing lowers output quantity and submission time, a framing effect. Across workers, a higher rating of the prosocial framing is associated with more words, higher quality, and longer submission times, but these associations do not survive within-worker comparison, nor does the association with work satisfaction once a worker's own ratings are held fixed. Among workers who rank the two tasks strictly, 35.4% never give up pay for meaning, and their ratings do not separate them from workers who do. Five light-touch interventions do not detectably move perceived meaning, difficulty, work satisfaction, or mood. The results suggest that the effects of meaningful work are best studied by comparing the same worker across randomly assigned tasks, and that perceived meaning is neither easily moved by brief prompts nor a reliable guide to who values it.

Recent studies have found large positive effects of working compared to pure cash transfers on various measures of mental health for labor demand-constrained populations. We hypothesize that some such benefits could stem from belonging to and training with a team even if one is not ultimately selected to work, which we term as "being on the bench". This study proposes a novel field experiment to investigate the effects of being placed on the bench by a randomized employment lottery for forcibly displaced Venezuelan migrants in Roraima, a Brazilian border state. This population is understood to have both high unemployment and job-seeking as well as poor mental health, making them both appropriate and necessary to study. Similar to previous studies, we also include a cash transfer treatment arm and pure control for comparison.

High unemployment rates among tertiary-educated people pose challenges in low and middle income countries, particularly affecting graduates in Sub-Saharan African countries. This study specifically examines the role of social norms and how they affect Ghanaian business school graduates' willingness to take low-paid jobs as potential stepping stones to better career opportunities. We use surveys and interviews to inform a future randomized controlled trial aimed at modifying graduates' misconceptions and at increasing acceptance of low-paid employment. The findings should guide universities and policymakers to mitigate social pressures and help graduates navigate the labor market.