The Psychosocial Impacts of Forced Idleness

By: Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane and Fatima Zahra

Format:Print
| Language:English

Abstract

Social scientists have long posited that employment may deliver psychological utility beyond the value of income alone. Existing literature, however, suffers from problems of selection into employment and an inability to disentangle the pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms driving wellbeing. This paper presents a real-world causal estimate of the psychosocial benefits of employment. We engage 745 individuals from the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh, with whom we run a field experiment with three arms: (1) a control arm, in which no work is offered; (2) a cash arm, in which no work is offered but a weekly fee is provided; and (3) a gainful employment arm, in which work is offered and individuals are paid weekly the equivalent of that in the cash arm. Building on existing observations in psychology, we further investigate the causal roles of past trauma and future uncertainty in mediating the impact of employment on psychosocial wellbeing.