TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Falk, Armin
AU  - Menrath, Ingo
AU  - Verde, Pablo Emilio
AU  - Siegrist, Johannes
        TI  - Cardiovascular Consequences of Unfair Pay
        PY  - 2011/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 5720
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp5720
        AB  - This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent's reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents' heart rate variability. Our findings provide evidence of a link between perceived unfairness and heart rate variability. The latter is an indicator of stress-related impaired cardiac autonomic control, which has been shown to predict coronary heart diseases in the long run. Establishing a causal link between unfair pay and heart rate variability therefore uncovers a mechanism of how perceptions of unfairness can adversely affect cardiovascular health. We further test potential adverse health effects of unfair pay using data from a large representative data set. Complementary to our experimental findings we find a strong and highly significant association between health outcomes, in particular cardiovascular health, and fairness of pay.
        KW  - fairness
KW  - social preferences
KW  - inequality
KW  - heart rate variability
KW  - health
KW  - experiments
KW  - SOEP
        ER  -