Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization最新文献

We study experimental measures of preferences for intra-household resource control among 3387 couples in Ghana and Uganda. We implement two incentivized tasks: (1) a game that measures willingness to pay for resource control in the household, and (2) dictator games played privately and jointly by spouses. Across study sites we find that women exhibit a higher willingness to pay for resource control than their husbands and have less influence over joint dictator game decisions. Importantly, behavior in the two tasks is correlated, suggesting that they capture similar underlying latent variables. In Uganda, experimental measures from both tasks are also robustly correlated with a range of survey measures of women's access to resources, agency, and wellbeing. This is not the case in Ghana, suggesting that contextual factors may be important, and researchers may want to collect both measures in a project. Like other recent papers, we find that an important fraction of respondents display negative willingness to pay for intra-household resource control. Our analysis shows that such behavior is displayed by women who have higher levels of economic empowerment and wellbeing, a result that contradicts previous conjectures made in the literature. Altogether, our analysis suggests that, despite lacking ideal theoretical properties, private dictator game decisions (even when collected only from the wife) can perform well as proxies of empowerment.

We study the differences in utilization patterns of Emergency Room (ER) services by infants – babies between 0-1 years of age – comparing natives and migrants. We use administrative data relative to the Metropolitan area of Milan (Italy), involving more than 45,000 babies and covering the years 2015–2016. The main findings point to a higher propensity to use ER services by migrants, who are also associated with a higher risk of inappropriate admissions. This also holds after controlling for selection effects and excluding trauma episodes. When we explore the potential mechanisms driving these results, we find that linguistic and cultural distance between natives and migrants is a key factor in explaining the higher and inappropriate use of emergency care. Conversely, supply-side factors do not seem to play a relevant role. These findings suggest that integration policies aimed for instance at increasing the language proficiency of immigrants would help improve the appropriate use of emergency care.

We experimentally investigate the effects of uncertain negative externalities on corruption engagement and social beliefs. We report two experiments in which corruption is modeled as a common-pool resource. In our first experiment, participants face a decision to bribe a public official for a service where accepted bribes impose probabilistic external costs on the briber and other participants. We find that the decision to bribe is positively associated with the belief that others will do the same. We also find that participants overestimate their ability to avoid external costs. Experiment 2 explores endogeneity and ambiguity in types using a contextualized version of the corruption dilemma. Consistent with experiment 1, choosing to offer a bribe is positively associated with the expectation of similar behavior. Curiously, we find little evidence that beliefs about one’s own type affect the decision to bribe.

To extend the labour market participation of seniors, numerous countries provide subsidies to incentivise their recruitment or employment. Prior research demonstrates that the effectiveness of such subsidies is rather unsatisfactory, although the reasons for this inadequacy remain unclear. Therefore, we examined negative employer perceptions triggered by eligibility for such subsidies that might explain this disappointing effectiveness. To this end, we set up a vignette experiment in which 292 genuine recruiters assessed fictitious candidates on their hireability and underlying productivity estimations. These candidates differed experimentally in their eligibility for a hiring subsidy targeted at the unemployed aged 58 or over. Our results indicate that the subsidy has a negative effect on their hiring outcomes. This adverse effect is explained by negative perceptions that counteract the financial incentive. Specifically, the subsidised candidates signal lower physical and technological skills along with an augmented difficulty in hiring and labour inspection.

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ willingness to work in teams, using an online experiment. We implement a setup where individuals can choose to work on a real effort task either individually or together with a partner through online interaction. We find that although working in a team is more profitable and participants also expect this, a large fraction makes a financially costly decision by shying away from teamwork. Moreover, participants primed with COVID-19 are less likely to self-select into teamwork in a dynamic setting with two team selection periods, with the effect coming mainly from the second selection period, after a random fraction of participants are exogenously assigned to teamwork. We find that in addition to COVID-19 salience, social confidence, the willingness to socialize, and prior exposure to teamwork are significant predictors of the decision to join or avoid socially interactive work environments. Our findings provide insights into the potential impact of the pandemic on social interactions in a work setting.

Decisions with significant and long-lasting consequences can be influenced by conditions at the moment of choice, such as weather. Using administrative data from an online retailer, we examine whether temperature and other weather variables affect the search and purchase of energy-using durables, namely, air conditioners (ACs) and dryers. We observe more sales of ACs on hot days and fewer sales of dryers on hot, windy days. We find no impact for appliances whose usefulness is not affected by the weather. For AC, weather-induced searches and purchases are in lower-efficiency energy classes. Product search data allow us to look into the process leading up to purchase. Prospective AC buyers search less intensively when the temperature is higher, and the opposite holds for buyers of dryers when temperature and wind speed increase. Models of memory and attention can explain these behavioral patterns. Understanding these dynamics is important for designing adaptation and mitigation policies, given the energy needs of cooling technologies and their increased demand and usefulness in a rapidly warming world.

Changes in local labor supply may affect robot adoption by firms. We test this hypothesis by exploiting an increase in the number of workers and a change in the local workforce composition induced by exogenous immigration into Danish municipalities. Using the Danish employer-employee matched dataset over the period 1995-2019, we show in a shift-share regression that a larger share of non-Western immigrants in a municipality leads to fewer robot adoptions at the firm-level. Several demographic characteristics, including prime age and low skill level, make immigrant workers particularly substitutable for robots. As many advanced economies are facing labor shortages, this paper sheds light on the future of robotization.

We experimentally investigate the degree to which redistribution, the act of taking money from some individuals and giving it to others, affects social capital in groups. We measure social capital as the degree to which group members exhibit cooperativeness, trust and trustworthiness toward one another. Our experiment involves several rounds of real-effort production, in which we vary the degree to which individual income is redistributed at the end of each round according to either progressive or regressive redistributive policies. We find no statistically significant impacts of such experience with redistribution on any of our primary measures of social capital. Exploratory work considering heterogeneous impacts by relative income positions and using alternative measures of social capital also yields no reliable impacts. We observe some impacts of redistribution on productivity.

In this paper, we report the results of two experiments that randomise the share of individuals who are taking an action in subjects’ immediate environment. Despite the differences between our two settings (face masks and online camera use), we uncover some empirical results that are common to both. First, we find that the share of individuals taking the relevant action is increasing in the share of others who take the action (although the relationship need not be linear). Second, and despite this, we find that many individuals nonetheless defy social pressure. Our results point both to the importance of social pressure as well as its very real limits in our settings.

This paper estimates the contribution of human capital, measured using educational attainment and standardized test scores, to Black-white gaps in labor market outcomes in three separate samples of both men and women spanning the period from 1966 through 2019. There are three main findings. First, the magnitude of the reduction in the earnings gap that occurs after controlling for education and test scores has become much larger over time, suggesting a growing contribution of these traits to Black-white earnings disparities. Second, growth in the explanatory power of education and test scores has been primarily due to increases in the association between these traits and the likelihood of non-work, with no clear increases for hourly wages or other intensive earnings margins. Third, in most cases these trends are due to changes in the returns to the human capital traits, rather than changing racial gaps in the human capital traits themselves. These main findings apply qualitatively to both men and women. However, the magnitude of attenuation is much larger for women than for men, and conditional racial gaps in labor market outcome among women are often close to zero. Evidence suggests that this parity between Black and white women conditional on education and test scores is not primarily due to sample selection. Overall, the paper’s findings highlight how structural developments in the US labor market, such as increasing returns to skill and changing labor force participation rates by skill level and gender, have had disparate impacts across racial groups despite being race-neutral on their face.