# Week 8 transfer proposal: retention, conditions, and incidence

**Student / date:**  
**Working title:**  
**Status:** Proposed study; the supplied lab is an original synthetic teaching construction, not empirical replication.

Write at most two pages plus this ledger. Choose one pay-rule, wage-information or voice-service intervention. Replace prompts with a concrete feasible design; do not invent data access or confidential observations.

## Question, intervention, and comparison

State the economic question, available counterfactual, baseline eligibility and roster. Record announcement, assignment, delivery, awareness, behavior, payroll and follow-up dates as applicable. Distinguish access, awareness, use, response and remedy; for information, distinguish a benchmark, belief, offer and accepted job.

Name the assignment or identifying unit and the dependence/spillover boundary, including shared HR capacity or common pay rules. State the target estimand, horizon, denominators and uncertainty plan. Define voluntary quits, other separations, internal moves and returns separately.

## Two competing explanations

| Mechanism | Observable prediction | Distinguishing endpoint or variation | Remaining alternative explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explanation 1 | | | |
| Explanation 2 | | | |

Specify an independent conditions or worker-welfare endpoint with units and collection dates. Explain why it is not merely the channel's reporting volume or employer retention. Report first-stage content and observation rates. State why a user comparison or access/use Wald ratio would require additional identifying assumptions.

## Four-party incidence ledger

| Perspective | Population and denominator | Outcomes / units / horizon | Observed, elicited, modeled or missing? | Counterfactual and uncertainty | Missing coverage and follow-up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firm | | Output, quality, profits, recruiting and remedy resources | | | |
| All initial workers | Fixed baseline roster | Pay, hours, total earnings, conditions, risk and job value | | | |
| Entrants | Separate entry cohorts and applicant selection | Offers, accepted pay, conditions, outside alternatives | | | |
| Workers who leave | Post-treatment subset of initial workers | Destination employment, earnings, conditions and transition costs | | | |

Leavers already belong to the baseline cohort: do not add them twice. Mark transfers separately from resource changes. Keep condition-score units separate from monetary quantities and any explicitly modeled welfare weights. Missing destination earnings are not zero.

## Feasibility and claims

Describe permitted sources, linkage keys, consent and actual access; leave unavailable data marked unavailable. An anonymous channel may intentionally preclude person-level linkage. Do not reconstruct identities. Explain how follow-up avoids exposing workers to retaliation and how aggregate reporting protects small groups.

State which assumptions would be needed for a labor-supply elasticity or welfare calculation. Name at least one claim this design cannot justify. End with the most informative feasible measurement improvement and its cost.