Remy Beauregard

Inflation Expectations and Risk Premia in Emerging Bond Markets: Evidence from Mexico ▼

with Jens H. E. Christensen, Eric Fischer, and Simon Zhu · Journal of International Economics, vol. 151, 2024

To study inflation expectations and associated risk premia in emerging bond markets, we provide estimates for Mexico based on an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of nominal and real bond prices that accounts for their liquidity risk. Beyond documenting the existence of large and weakly correlated liquidity premia in nominal and real bond prices, our results indicate that long-term inflation expectations in Mexico are well anchored close to the Bank of Mexico’s inflation target. Furthermore, Mexican inflation risk premia are larger and more volatile than those in Canada and the United States.

Paid With(out) Purpose: Perceptions, Preferences, and the Meaning of Work ▼

Job Market Paper · Presented at WEAI '25, ESA '25, BABEEW '25 · 2025 Bacon Family Summer Fellowship

I develop a novel online experiment with 387 subjects and simple utility model to examine how workers respond to reported work meaning. Workers appear to strongly value different aspects of work and be willing to give up other incentives for their best work match. 31% of workers then appear not to value meaning in their work, 27% appear not to value work pay, 30% appear to value both, and 12% cannot be characterized. Overall, 57% of workers are willing to sacrifice up to 14% of possible pay in their pursuit of meaningful work. For workers who value work meaning, I estimate positive impacts of meaningfulness on the quantity and quality of output, although these effects appear only for a task with prosocial framing. Finally, I validate a light-touch treatment designed to increase worker awareness of the value they place on meaning, again finding effects only for workers who seek meaning in their work. Importantly, raising worker awareness of work meaning has no impact on the types of incentives they seek out. These results offer insights into how such interventions and preferences for work meaning might be leveraged in organizational settings.

Benefits on the Bench: Workfare, Mental Health, and the Role of the Team ▼

with Carlos Brito · Presented at AFE '25 · Presentation slides

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. As we expect these effects to operate through alignment with the meaningfulness or mission of work being trained for, we introduce variation in the meaningfulness of tasks offered. Similar to previous studies, we also include a cash transfer treatment arm and pure control for comparison.

What Moves Meaning? Investigating Drivers of an Idiosyncratic Incentive ▼

Draft coming soon

Recent research suggests that perceptions of work meaning are highly idiosyncratic, challenging earlier theories of greater homogeneity. I design a series of laboratory experiments to test whether manipulating various factors can shift workers’ sense of meaning. Consistent with emerging findings in the field, I observe that workers respond most positively to "Inception-style" treatments: interventions that prompt them to reflect abstractly and introspectively on what they find meaningful. In contrast, treatments that convey information intended to induce a sense of meaning (e.g., emphasizing the social value of the task) produce little to no effect. Unlike other non-monetary incentives such as vacation time, meaning appears to be a reward workers prefer to uncover for themselves. This insight has important implications for the design of effective incentive structures: conventional information-based interventions may fall short, whereas more open-ended, reflective prompts may prove more effective.