Contact

lisa.stockley@utoronto.ca
Department of Economics
150 St. George Street
Toronto ON M5S 3G7
Canada

Lisa Stockley

PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Toronto

Full Curriculum Vitae

Job Market Paper

Fields of Interest

Labour, Development, Experimental, and Behavioural Economics

About Me

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics, University of Toronto. Prior to this, I received a Master of Arts in Economics from the University of Toronto (2009) and an Honours Baccalaureate in Anthropology from the University of Guelph (2008).

My research focuses on labour supply, with emphasis on the relationship between financial incentives and effort for people in the developing world. My current research agenda involves using experimental design to incorporate behavioural insights into this area of study. In particular, my job market paper investigates the causal link between expectations of income and labour supply for Brazilian piece-rate workers.

I am currently a Senior Associate with Charles River Associates in Toronto.

Job Market Paper

How Do Expectations Influence Labour Supply? Evidence from a Framed Field Experiment

Labour income is a critical resource for the world's poor, yet remarkably little is conclusive about how labour supply is determined. To reconcile disparate evidence regarding individuals' response to wage changes, a leading behavioural theory proposes that in addition to valuing the level of income, workers evaluate income as gains or losses with respect to their expectations. In this paper, I am the first to test this model of labour supply in a real effort framed field experiment. Specifically, I conduct a set of experiments among a sample of impoverished individuals involved in piece-rate work in Northeast Brazil. I manipulate workers' probabilistic beliefs about income and check if these expectations determine labour supply. In both experiments, I find that expectations do influence effort: if expectations are high, participants work less than if expectations are low. This pattern is inconsistent with the leading behavioural model's predictions and existing laboratory evidence, suggesting that how expectations influence effort may vary with context.

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