Casual-Labor Field-Laboratory Screening Proxy
RCTClinical Trial
Testing real-world employer-employee screening dynamics in firm settings is difficult due to unobservable firm-specific incentives, long-term career dynamics, and non-random hiring criteria.
Picture this
Instead of trying to monitor hiring inside hundreds of private offices, researchers build a temporary standardized workplace in a local neighborhood and hire active day laborers. By controlling the exact pay rules and tasks in this temporary workspace, researchers can observe how real workers make referral decisions under clean, measurable conditions.
What the evidence says
Replicated real-world day-labor market conditions where 91 percent of participants were active labor force participants and 45 percent had made real job referrals, achieving a 72 percent return rate (N = 407 referrals) with robust experimental control over financial and screening incentives.
- Who was studied
- N = 561 male adult labor market participants recruited door-to-door in Kolkata, India (37 percent household recruitment response rate, 91 percent currently employed).
- How
- Hybrid lab-in-the-field experimental framework creating temporary supervised day-labor jobs with real-world financial stakes (135 Rupees daily pay versus 110 Rupees median daily income).
What to do
Utilize temporary field-laboratory job environments with market-calibrated wages to isolate employee screening capabilities from confounded organizational dynamics.
From the source
"Our study takes place in urban Kolkata, India. Many of our subjects work in informal and casual labor markets, where employment is often temporary and uncertain; these conditions are closely approximated by the day-labor nature of the task in our laboratory."
468 Job Referrals in India AER Dec12.pdf