Money or meaning? Labor supply responses to work meaning of employed and unemployed individuals

Abstract We analyze to what extent work meaning – the significance of a job for others or for society – increases the willingness of employed and unemployed individuals to accept a job. To this end, we elicit reservation wages for a one-hour job and randomly vary its description as having either ”high” or ”low” meaning. Our subjects participate in the ”Panel Study of Labour Market and Social Security” (PASS), which comprises a random draw from the German population and a random draw of unemployed individuals from the unemployment register. We can thus link subjects’ experimental behavior to rich survey data and control for selection into the experiment. For subjects who consider work meaning as very important (around one third of PASS respondents), high-meaning reduces the reservation wage by around 18 percent. By contrast, among unemployed individuals, work meaning increases the reservation wage by around 14 percent. We discuss how work meaning can have both positive and negative effects on labor supply when it interacts with fairness concerns or work norms.