American Economic Review Vol. 112 No. 11 2022

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

Reshmaan Hussam¹; Erin Kelley²; Gregory Lane³; Fatima Zahra⁴

¹ Harvard Business School (email: ) · ² Development Impact Evaluation Department, World Bank (email: ) · ³ Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago (email: ) · ⁴ New York University (email: )

Abstract

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: a control arm, a weekly cash arm, and an employment arm of equal value. Employment raises psychosocial well-being substantially more than cash alone, and 66 percent of the employed are willing to forgo cash payments to continue working temporarily for free. Despite material poverty, those in our context both experience and recognize a nonmonetary, psychosocial value to employment.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20211616

Volume

112

Issue

11

Pages

3694-3724

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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