Field experiments on beliefs, information, and work
I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, a J-PAL Invited Researcher, and an IZA Research Fellow. My work uses natural field experiments to study how people form beliefs about the labour market — about their own comparative advantage, about what employers want, about what everyone else is doing — and what happens to their careers when those beliefs are wrong.
Most of my field work runs in Ethiopia, South Africa, China, and Vietnam, with jobseekers, factory workers, and firms. A second strand of my research asks the same question of political behaviour: why people turn out for a protest, and what they believe about the crowd before they do.
Office hours: Tuesdays 10:30–11:45, Guanghua Building 2, Office 343. Email ahead if you want to discuss something specific — otherwise just come by.
Selected work
2026
Formalized Employee Search and Labor Demand
with Tsegay Tekleselassie & Marc Witte · Journal of Development EconomicsForthcoming
Firms often use social networks to find workers, limiting the pool of potential applicants. We conduct a field experiment subsidizing firms’ formal vacancy posting. The subsidies increase non-network employee search and shift vacancies towards high-skilled positions. Post-treatment, firms continue searching for high-skilled workers despite reverting to network-based search. This change in skill requirements does not increase vacancy posting or hiring, suggesting substitutability between workers of different skill levels. Finally, we experimentally show that information asymmetries about applicants’ skills do not limit firms’ formal search. Our results highlight that exposure to different labor market segments can permanently change firms’ labor demand.
▸Citation
Hensel, Lukas, Tsegay Tekleselassie, and Marc Witte. 2026. “Formalized Employee Search and Labor Demand.” Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming.
▸BibTeX
@article{hensel2026formalized,
author = {Hensel, Lukas and Tekleselassie, Tsegay and Witte, Marc},
title = {{Formalized Employee Search and Labor Demand}},
journal = {Journal of Development Economics},
year = {2026},
note = {Forthcoming}
}
R&R
Jobseekers’ Beliefs about Comparative Advantage and (Mis)Directed Search
with Andrea Kiss, Rob Garlick & Kate Orkin · Revise and resubmit, AEJ: Applied
Garlick, Rob, Lukas Hensel, Andrea Kiss, and Kate Orkin. n.d.. “Jobseekers’ Beliefs about Comparative Advantage and (Mis)Directed Search.” Revise and resubmit, AEJ: Applied.
▸BibTeX
@unpublished{garlickwpjobseekers,
author = {Garlick, Rob and Hensel, Lukas and Kiss, Andrea and Orkin, Kate},
title = {{Jobseekers’ Beliefs about Comparative Advantage and (Mis)Directed Search}},
note = {Revise and resubmit, AEJ: Applied}
}
2025
Voice and Political Engagement: Evidence from a Field Experiment
with Anselm Hager, Christopher Roth & Andreas Stegmann · Review of Economics and Statistics · 107(4), 1149–1158
We conduct a natural field experiment with a major European party to test whether giving party supporters more voice increases their engagement in the party’s electoral campaign. In the experiment, the party asked a random subset of supporters for their opinions on the importance of different policy areas. Giving supporters opportunities to voice their opinions increases their engagement in the campaign as measured using behavioral data from the party’s smartphone application. Survey data reveals that giving voice also increases other margins of campaign effort as well as perceived voice. Our evidence highlights the importance of voice for increasing political engagement.
▸Citation
Hager, Anselm, Lukas Hensel, Christopher Roth, and Andreas Stegmann. 2025. “Voice and Political Engagement: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Review of Economics and Statistics 107 (4): 1149–1158.
▸BibTeX
@article{hager2025voice,
author = {Hager, Anselm and Hensel, Lukas and Roth, Christopher and Stegmann, Andreas},
title = {{Voice and Political Engagement: Evidence from a Field Experiment}},
journal = {Review of Economics and Statistics},
volume = {107},
number = {4},
pages = {1149--1158},
year = {2025}
}
