The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp
通过在孟加拉国难民营的实地实验，发现就业带来的心理社会福祉提升远超同等价值的现金，66%的受雇者愿意无偿继续工作，表明就业具有非货币的心理社会价值。
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.