In Simple Words
Paying for a hotel room on a daily basis means an individual can be checked out at any morning's notice, whereas paying monthly rent reflects a stable, longer commitment. Tracking how frequently a worker receives payment—daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly—reveals the underlying length and stability of their job arrangement without needing formal human resource records.
Young male job applicants in Malawi
- Without short work experience
- Reference payment-frequency score
- With short work experience
- 0.386 lower score estimated
Eight-month IV estimate; not statistically significant. Proxy scale: 1 daily to 4 monthly. The estimate does not establish a change in actual contract permanence.
See source →Research question
In developing labor markets lacking formal written contracts, directly measuring job stability and contract duration is difficult due to non-standard employment terms. Self-reported remuneration frequency provides a structured proxy for classifying job permanence and contract stability.
Participants
N = 227 urban male youth job seekers in Lilongwe, Malawi.
Study Design
Constructed an ordinal permanence scale (1 = daily, 2 = weekly, 3 = fortnightly, 4 = monthly) across post-intervention primary jobs to test whether short-term work experience shifts workers toward permanent contracts.
Results
Experimentally induced short-term work experience resulted in a negative point estimate on payment frequency (-0.318 ITT, -0.386 IV, p > 0.10), indicating that the observed wage gains occurred through less permanent, daily-remunerated positions rather than permanent monthly roles.
Takeaway
Utilize worker remuneration frequency metrics as a proxy for job contract permanence when formal employment contracts are unobserved.