Memory and Labor Supply

In preliminary research, I document that casual daily laborers present biased memory of their past labor supply. In this work, I plan to investigate i) whether biased memory causes lower future labor supply, ii) which are the underlying psychological mechanisms, iii) how we can leverage this intuition to support workers’ job search. In particular, I hypothesize that attention and motivated belief might generate this bias, and I plan to run an RCT in Kenya to test these hypotheses. This work could thus provide a micro-foundation for the existence of poverty traps.