labor economics

The Economics of Babysitting a Robot

I study the costs of interacting with automation technologies in a task-switching environment. In the experiment, subjects choose between a manual option without task-switching and an automated option with task-switching but higher expected earnings. …

Give Me a Challenge or Give Me a Raise

I study the effect of task difficulty on workers’ effort. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort and that this effect is quantitatively large, especially when compared to the effect of conditional monetary rewards. Difficulty …

Using Response Times to Measure Ability on a Cognitive Task

I show how using response times as a proxy for effort can address a long-standing issue of how to separate the effect of cognitive ability on performance from the effect of motivation. My method is based on a dynamic stochastic model of optimal …