"Do Workers Value Flexible Jobs? A Field Experiment" a study paper wrote by Professor He Haoran, School of Economics and Management, Beijing Normal University, co-authored with Professor David Neumark, University of California-Irvine, and Professor Weng Qian, associate professor at Renmin University of China was officially adopted and published by Journal of Labor Economics, a top international journal of Labor Economics, and released online.

(https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/711226).

Advances in mobile communications have made telecommuting possible and spurred the widespread adoption of flexible working system. As an important feature of non-monetary work, flexible working system was often considered as one of the important factors affecting employees' choice of work. But to what extent did employees value flexible working? To answer this question, we actually tested the important compensatory wage difference theory in labor economics.

We conducted a field experiment with job seekers on a large online recruitment platform in China. The experimental design combined the advantages of the demonstrative and declarative preference measurement methods to change the flexible working conditions and wage characteristics of internal and external conditions in real job hunting scenarios. In this way, we obtained high-quality data of revealed preference in the real job hunting process, so we estimated job seekers’ preference to flexible work in a relatively accurate way, and effectively improved the internal and external validity of the estimated results.

The results showed that compared with those experiments without flexible working, the job application rate of job seekers in those experiments with flexible working increased by 62% to 92%, among which the application rate increased the most in the experiments with both time and place flexibility. On average, job seekers were willing to afford a monthly payment reduce of 5,000 to 10,000 yuan for flexible working conditions. Further analysis by marital status and gender revealed that married men and women had significant preferences for multiple types of flexible working conditions, but unmarried men and women did not. Based on the experimental results, the study further developed theoretical models to explain the relationship between the obtained results and job seeker preferences.

Journal of Labor Economics was founded in 1983, belonging to Society of Labor Economics. It is a top Journal in the field of Labor Economics and one of the core journals with the highest reputation in the research of full-aperture Economics. The journal is an ABS-accredited 4-star journal in economics, and its 2018 JCR impact factor is: 4.452.

He Haoran, PhD in Economics. He graduated from Renmin University of China with his bachelor's degree in 2004, Chinese Academy of Sciences with his master's degree in 2007, and then after his graduation in 2010 from university of Gothenburg, he became an assistant professor in the School of Economics and Business Administration of Beijing Normal University, and later was promoted as associate professor, now he is a distinguished professor. His research interests include experimental economics, behavioral economics and labor economics.

(Provided by the Research Office)