ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES (ESS) - 2025/2026

Speaker: Julien Senn (Paris 1 Pantheon- Sorbonne)

Title: Social Preferences, Life Goals, and Career Choices

Abstract: We study how social preferences shape life goals, job-attribute demand, and career choices using a two-wave study. We first elicit distributional preferences and structurally estimate two facets of social preferences: altruism in the advantageous and in the disadvantageous domain. We show that these two parameters are negatively correlated and that regressions that fail to account for both may yield strongly biased estimates of the effects of social preferences. In a next step, we link these parameters to measures of respondents’ life goals and their preferences over job attributes elicited six months later, and to third-party data covering their career choices. We document three main findings. First, those with stronger social preferences deem career, wealth, and financial security as less important for their overall life satisfaction. Second, those with stronger social preferences consistently rank meaning-at-work and corporate social responsibility as very important job attributes, and put lower weights on the pecuniary aspects. In a discrete choice experiment, we show that those with stronger social preferences are willing to forego some money in order not to work in a socially harmful industry. Finally, we show that those who are more altruists in the advantageous domain are significantly more likely to sort into “social jobs”. Together, our results indicate that social preferences are a fundamental determinant of demand for job-mission and meaning at work and offer a preference-based account for sorting in the labor market. They also highlight the importance of treating social preferences as a multi-faceted construct.