Can working hard make one rich? Evidence from online content contributors

ABSTRACT

In traditional working situations, it is generally accepted that working hard can result in better performance and higher income levels. However, research on whether this holds in the context of online content contribution is scant. This study examines the effect of working hard on the rate of earnings of content contributors on an online platform. The empirical results of a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model show that longer hours of performance cannot induce more hourly monetary earnings, which suggests that working hard does not make online contributors rich. Furthermore, our investigations show that although working hard is not effective in increasing the earnings rate of individuals who have above-average earnings, it does have a positive effect on the earnings of those with below-average hourly revenue.

KEYWORDS:

• Earning rate
• working hard
• content contribution
• PVAR

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J40
• M50

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestreaming

² We also fit a second-order PVAR as suggested by MAIC as the robustness check, which is presented in the online appendix.

³ We conduct two robustness checks, which are available in the online appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2021ECNU-HWCBFBLW003].