This dissertation analyzes how cultural and behavioral frictions affect decision-making in labor markets of developing economies. It studies factors that have received relatively little attention in economics—namely concerns about preserving identity, cognitive strain from financial stress, and gender norms—and examines their impacts on labor supply and productivity. Field experiments in the state of Odisha, India are used to provide direct empirical evidence on these relationships. Chapter 1 investigates how identity—one's concept of self—influences economic behavior in the labor market, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In the experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers' average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes other than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers' own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers' choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. Results indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy. Chapter 2—joint work with Supreet Kaur, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Frank Schilbach—tests for a direct causal impact of financial strain on worker productivity. The experiment randomly varies timing of income receipt among laborers who earn piece rates for manufacturing tasks: some workers receive their wages on earlier dates, altering when cash constraints are eased while holding overall wealth constant. Workers increase productivity by 5.3% on average in the days after cash receipt. The impacts are concentrated among poorer workers in the sample, who increase output by over 10%. This effect of cash on hand on productivity is not explained by mechanisms such as gift exchange, trust in the employer, or nutrition. The chapter also presents positive evidence that productivity increases are mediated through lower attentional errors in production, indicating a role for improved cognition after cash receipt. Finally, directing workers’ attention to their finances via a salience intervention produced mixed results—consistent with concerns about priming highlighted in the literature. Results indicate a direct relationship between financial constraints and worker productivity and suggest that psychological channels mediated through attention play a role in this relationship. Chapter 3 examines whether gender norms lead women to hold back their potential in the labor market. While the existing literature has shown that women tend to earn less than their husbands, there is limited direct evidence on whether women actively avoid earning more than their spouses and the determinants of such behavior. The experiment engages married couples working as casual laborers in a short-term manufacturing job that pays piece-rate on output. The experiment provides women an extra hour to work without this difference being salient, making it likely that they could earn more than their husbands. After husbands finish piece-rate production, women are randomized into one of three conditions in which 1) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects both spouses to learn how much each spouse has produced, 2) the wife is informed of her husband’s production and expects that only she will learn how much each spouse has produced, or 3) both spouses are only informed of their joint total production. Results show that women in the last two conditions achieve on average one hour’s worth of production more than that of their husbands, suggesting that women do not face intrinsic concerns about earning more than their husbands. However, this productivity gap substantially decreases when husbands are expected to learn about individual production. This finding suggests that norms in marriage may be an important factor contributing to gender inequality in the labor market.

This dissertation studies the role of occupation-specific human capital in explaining the long-run decline in labor market dynamics observed in the United States for the past four decades. Chapter 1 presents empirical facts on labor market outcomes by required occupation-specific training. This is to provide evidence that (i) required length of occupation-specific training is a proxy for the specificity of human capital to perform the occupation and that (ii) increasing occupation specificity has led to the decline in labor market dynamics. First, I find from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and O*NET that for the past four decades, within occupations, there has been an increase the amount of time needed to become trained in the occupation. I then find from the Survey of Income and Program Participation that the average wage loss experienced by occupation switchers after unemployment increases when their occupation held before unemployment has faced over time an increase in occupation-specific training. I take this as evidence that the observed increase in occupation-specific training over time has made human capital less transferable across occupations. I then proceed to use the Monthly Current Population Survey, combined with the required length of occupation-specific training by occupation from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and O*NET, to do a shift-share decomposition of the decline in labor market outcomes. The decline in the aggregate job separation rate and the increase in unemployment duration is accounted for mostly by the increase in specific training within occupations. Motivated by my empirical analysis, in Chapter 2, I then build a search-and-matching model to learn how the increase in specificity within occupations explains the decline in the aggregate job separation rate. The main ingredients are endogenous job separations and occupation-specific human capital that workers acquire during employment and lose when they switch occupations. My model has two occupation specificity parameters: (i) the average duration of occupation-specific training and (ii) the output gap by which nontrained workers are less productive because they have not yet acquired the occupation-specific capital. To ask my model how much of a decline it predicts in the aggregate job separation rate when occupations become more specific, the occupation specificity parameters in the model are increased to match the increase in occupation specificity in the data. The increase in the average duration of occupation-specific training matches the required length of occupation-specific training from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and O*NET. The increase in the output gap is informed by the estimated increase in the wage penalty faced by occupation switchers (relative to non-occupation switchers) when their previously held occupation requires more occupation-specific training, obtained from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The model predicts 60% of the decline in the aggregate job separation rate. Chapter 3 relaxes the assumption that occupation switching is exogenous in Chapter 2, endogenizing occupation switching in addition to job separations. The model predicts a greater increase in the average unemployment duration in line with the data. In the model, the longer unemployment spells are due to the unemployed trained workers, whose human capital has become more specific to their previous occupation, choosing not to switch occupations. If they switch occupations, they could quickly end their unemployment spell. This would however come at the cost of larger wage cuts because their human capital has become less transferable to a different occupation. Occupation switchers would also have to earn these lower wages for a longer period of time until they become trained in their new occupation. Hence, despite a low probability of getting reemployed in the same occupation as before, previously trained workers increasingly choose not to switch occupations, which increases the average unemployment duration.

Two theories of work motivation taken from the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology were compared in a six-week field experiment at a Fortune 500 company. A Job Enrichment Model (Hackman & Oldham, 1975) was used and the Motivating Potential Score (MPS) of three groups of machine operators was obtained before and after a six-week productivity study. Three goal conditions based on Goal Theory (Locke, 1968) were assigned one to each of three groups of machine operators and comparisons were made between the treatment groups. Production increases resulted from providing goals and feedback to subjects, but these increases were not statistically significant. The hourly goal condition with feedback had the largest increase over baseline, greater than either daily goals with feedback or the "do your best" goal condition with no feedback. A weak correlation exists (r =.17) between the change in worker's MPS and the worker's change in production.

A research report submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree Master of Arts in Social and Psychological Research by coursework and research report in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Linking health and productivity to organisational advantages, this study explores the benefits that health screening may provide organisations in South Africa. Health was evaluated in this research as the amount of lifestyle factors (physical inactivity, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and BMI) and biometric factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high glucose) employees were at risk for. The study aimed to investigate whether increased health leads to the experience of negative health consequences, which may negatively impact on productivity in the workplace. Productivity was assessed firstly by a person’s ability to be at work, and secondly by their ability to significantly contribute to their organisation while they were at work. As such, workplace productivity loss was evaluated in terms of the direct, and indirect, organisational costs that ill-health results in. Workplace productivity loss was measured using the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire: General Health V2.0 (WPAI-GH). Participants were 409 employees from an organisation in the financial service sector (Mage = 41.86, SD = 9.3). Multiple regression analysis found one lifestyle factor (physical inactivity) and one biometric factor (cholesterol) to significantly predicted work productivity. Cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, BMI and blood pressure did not significantly predict workplace productivity loss. Significant relationships were found between physical inactivity and BMI, blood pressure and cholesterol. Alcohol consumption was significantly related to cigarette smoking and blood pressure, while BMI and blood pressure had a significant relationship. The findings contribute to knowledge on how workplace productivity can be promoted through healthy lifestyle behaviours and biometric risk factors. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed in terms of how organisations can design, implement and evaluate appropriate workplace programmes that are related to the specific health needs of their employees. This was positioned as an essential business practice that positively relates to organisational effectiveness by increasing workplace productivity. Keywords: workplace productivity loss, lifestyle risk factors, biometric risk factors, organisational advantage, South Africa / GR2017

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The objective of this paper is to analyze methods of measurement of labor productivity and introduce them to real business. The object of this paper is to investigate methods of measuring performance. The subject of this paper is the process of implementing methods to increase productivity. Methods (procedures) of the study. Pattern during the writing of this work was used by scientists articles information about the measurement and implementation of systems productivity. Recommendations for the use of this work. Since this work was written with the use of different methods and examples, not all of them before writing the work was known to me, I want to present a certain part to improve the productivity of some companies in my country.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of organizational economics and political economy. The first essay examines the question of mentoring and training in public sector organizations. On the job training is one of the most effective ways of improving productivity. However, managers face a trade-off when allocating time between their own outputproduction and mentoring the juniors, as mentoring takes time that managers could spend on other output production activities. Using the data on bureaucrats from the India Civil Services, I provide evidence of this trade-off. I find that junior bureaucrats in India show better performance in the district training courses when their mentors’ output is imperfectly observed by the supervisors of the mentors. I infer this difference in the performance of junior bureaucrats as an indication of differences in the mentoring efforts of the seniors. I exploit a policy reform to further show that bureaucrats are multi-tasking agents allocating time between mentoring junior bureaucrats and public service delivery. I find evidence that the reform that was introduced to bring greater transparency in the performance evaluation process shifts effort from mentoring to own output production, thereby reducing gaps in mentoring efforts. Overall, this chapter highlights the existence of perverse incentives for mentors that can affect the effectiveness of training and mentoring initiatives. The second chapter focuses on the question of distributive politics and how politicians target resources among their constituents. Using the employment data from the largest workfare program in the world, I study how employment generated under the program varies across constituencies that are represented by politicians from the ruling party. Using a close election regression discontinuity framework, I find that employment is higher in constituencies with ruling party politicians. Further, I document targeted flow of program benefits to specific marginalized groups. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I examine the politicization of bureaucratic appointments in India. Using data from two states of the country, I study appointments to the post of the district collector. I document significant differences in the characteristics of the officers that get appointed to districts with a greater proportion of politicians from the ruling party. I find that districts with greater "alignment" to the ruling party get younger officers who have been recruited through a much more rigorous exam and are less likely to be a native of the state. I find no evidence that caste plays a role in these appointments.

В современных реалиях компании все чаще обращают внимание на лучшие мировые практики в области производственного менеджмента и ищут источники для организации наиболее эффективных производственных систем. Одной из таких практик является внедрение инструментов Теории ограничений. Целью диссертационной работы является развитие методических и прикладных основ управления производительностью труда на основе Теории ограничений. По результатам работы был адаптирован для целей управления производительностью труда на промышленном предприятии общий алгоритм решения производственных проблем Теории ограничений («алгоритм пяти шагов»). Адаптированный алгоритм включает в себя: 1) формулировку принципов (теоретической рамки) решения проблемы низкого уровня производительности труда; 2) выделение четырех фаз процесса устранения проблемы низкой производительности труда; 3) реализацию 13 шагов устранения проблемы. Предложенный алгоритм развивает методические основы управления производительностью труда на основе Теории ограничений и способствуют повышению эффективности производственной деятельности предприятия. / In modern realities, companies are increasingly paying attention to the best world practices in the field of production management and are looking for sources to organize the most efficient production systems. One such practice is the implementation of the Theory of Constraints tools. The purpose of the dissertation is to develop the methodological and applied foundations of labor productivity management based on the Theory of Constraints. Based on the results of the work, a general algorithm for solving production problems of the Theory of Constraints (“five-step algorithm”) was adapted for the purposes of managing labor productivity at an industrial enterprise. The adapted algorithm includes: 1) the formulation of principles (theoretical framework) for solving the problem of low labor productivity; 2) allocation of four phases of the process of eliminating the problem of low labor productivity; 3) implementation of 13 troubleshooting steps. The proposed algorithm develops the methodological foundations of labor productivity management based on the Theory of Constraints and contributes to improving the efficiency of the enterprise's production activities.