Authors:

  • Ashley Whillans

Excerpt

From Dollars to Sense: Placing a Monetary Value on Non-Cash Compensation Encourages Employees to Value Time over Money.  Ashley Whillans, 2019, Paper, "When deciding where to work, employees may focus too much on salary and not enough on non cash benefits such as paid time-off, potentially undermining their long-term happiness. We propose a simple solution to encourage employees to recognize the value of non-cash benefits: list the financial value of non-cash compensation. Results from one archival data set (n = 42,271) and eight studies (n = 3,190) provide evidence for these ideas. First, as expected, employees who receive non-cash compensation are happier than employees who do not. Yet, prospective employees underestimate the happiness benefit of non-cash benefits. Second, and most critically, prospective employees are more likely to choose jobs with greater non-cash benefits and lower salaries when the cash value of these non-cash benefits are listed." Link