We analyze to what extent work meaning – the significance of a job for others or for society – increases the willingness of employed and unemployed individuals to accept a job. To this end, we elicit reservation wages for a one-hour job and randomly vary its description as having either ”high” or ”low” meaning. Our subjects participate in the ”Panel Study of Labour Market and Social Security” (PASS), which comprises a random draw from the German population and a random draw of unemployed individuals from the unemployment register. We can thus link subjects’ experimental behavior to rich survey data and control for selection into the experiment. For subjects who consider work meaning as very important (around one third of PASS respondents), high-meaning reduces the reservation wage by around 18 percent. By contrast, among unemployed individuals, work meaning increases the reservation wage by around 14 percent. We discuss how work meaning can have both positive and negative effects on labor supply when it interacts with fairness concerns or work norms.

我们分析了工作的意义——工作对他人或社会的重要性——在多大程度上增加了就业和失业个人接受工作的意愿。为此，我们引出一小时工作的保留工资，并随机将其描述更改为具有“高”或“低”的含义。我们的受试者参加了“劳动力市场和社会保障小组研究”（PASS），其中包括从德国人口中随机抽取和从失业登记册中随机抽取失业人员。因此，我们可以将受试者的实验行为与丰富的调查数据和控制选择关联到实验中。对于认为工作意义非常重要的受试者（大约三分之一的 PASS 受访者），高意义使保留工资降低了大约 18%。相比之下，在失业人员中，工作意义将保留工资提高了约 14%。我们讨论了当工作意义与公平问题或工作规范相互作用时，它如何对劳动力供应产生积极和消极的影响。