Personal safety first: Do workers value safer jobs?

We elicit college students’ willingness to pay (WTP) for an early versus late job shift in an unsafe neighborhood. We find that concerns about late shift safety and gender are determinants of differences in WTP: Subjects with higher personal safety concerns (i.e., feeling unsafe on the way to or around work) and women forego more earnings to secure the early shift. Yet, we find no differences in WTP when the job is remote. Controlling for a wide range of confounders, such as risk preferences, morning preferences, time use, demographic characteristics, victimization, and information about crime, does not meaningfully affect the effect of safety concerns. Victimization and time use mediate the gender gap. Exploiting past administrative data, we find that subjects with higher WTP for the safer on-site shift are less likely to enroll in evening classes and leave campus earlier during the term, providing evidence for the external validity of our study.

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