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Economics Department Weekly Seminar | Natasha Jha | 18th March 2026 | 1:40 PM

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Title: Job Amenities and Misallocation of Talent

Abstract: We study how scheduling requirements affect workers' willingness to accept jobs and whether these effects vary by gender and ability. Using an incentivized contract choice experiment with US workers in an online labor market, we vary outside-hours scheduling and advance notice independently. Outside-hours scheduling with advance notice generates no reservation wage premium; the absence of advance notice raises reservation wages by approximately 14 percent. The two dimensions are not additive. Women require substantially more compensation as flexibility conditions worsen, with the gap largest at low wages and among workers without flexible baseline schedules. Mechanism analysis rules out taste-based preferences and childcare as primary drivers; the gender differential is concentrated among workers with high household work intensity, consistent with domestic burden operating as a binding time constraint. The no-notice penalty scales with worker ability across all ability measures, with implications for firm talent composition.