Topic：What is in Local Dialects? A Field Experiment on Social Distance and Human Capital Development in Job Training

Speaker：Sherry Li 

Time：September 15, 2022  10:00am

Location:  Tencent Meeting number：268-925-757

Abstract: This paper presents a field experiment at a large garment factory in China to investigate how social distance between new sewing workers and their trainers affect the efficacy of on-the-job training. During the factory’s new-worker training program, we randomly pair trainers and trainees based on whether they speak the same dialects. We find that trainers voluntarily transfer more sewing techniques to trainees who speak the same dialects, thus boosting their productivity relative to those who do not. Furthermore, this positive effect of dialect ties operates through non-work-related social connectedness between trainers and trainees. Our results suggest that social connectedness could be cost-efficient leverage to reduce training costs and improve training outcomes.

Introduction of the speaker: Sherry Li is a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Behavioral Business Research Lab of the Sam M.Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Her research is primarily experimental and behavioral, in areas of broadly defined public economics, labor economics, and development economics. Her research has been published in prestigious economics journals including American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Development Economics, and Experimental Economics. She is currently an Associate Editor at Economic Inquiry and Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. She received her Ph.D.in economics from the University of Michigan in 2006.Before she joined the University of Arkansas, she was on the faculty of Economics at the University of Texas-Dallas (UTD) and served as the Director of the Negotiations Center at UTD from 2013 to 2018.