Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization最新文献

News—anticipated changes of an economy’s fundamentals—drive the business cycle. Climate change is big news: it will impact the economy profoundly, but its full effect will take time to materialize. To better understand the transmission of news, this paper focuses on climate-change expectations. First, we measure the expected economic impact of climate change in a representative survey of U.S. consumers. We find, in particular, that costly natural disasters are salient of climate change. Second, we calibrate a New Keynesian model with rare disasters to the survey results and find that shifts in climate-change expectations operate like adverse demand shocks.

Can noisy signals about comparative advantage have long-term effects on major choices and later-life outcomes? We study the effects of grades in introductory courses on students’ choice of major and labor market outcomes. Students in our setting observe their letter grades but not the underlying scores (0-100). Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find that students just above a letter-grade cutoff in an introductory course are 3.6% more likely to major in the same field as that course. We find larger effects on students with noisier priors about their comparative advantage and in fields with higher income-GPA gradients. These results are consistent with a model where students with incomplete information learn about their comparative advantage in different fields through introductory course grades.

We investigate how negatively reciprocal traits of unemployed individuals interact with “sticks” policies that impose constraints on individual job search effort, in the context of the German welfare system. For this we merge survey data of long-term unemployed individuals, containing indicators of reciprocity, to a unique set of register data on all unemployed coached by the same team of caseworkers and treatments they receive. We find that the combination of a higher negative reciprocity and a stricter regime has a negative interaction effect on search effort exerted by the unemployed. The results are stronger for males than for females. Stricter regimes may drive long-term unemployed males with certain types of social preferences further away from the labor market.

For decades, Asian Americans have been characterized as a “model minority” due to perceived success in educational attainment and labor market outcomes. However, there are concerns that Asians remain underrepresented in top-level positions in the workplace. This study presents new evidence on the extent of this underrepresentation between US-born Asian American and White men and examines mechanisms driving racial leadership gaps. Results indicate that Asian men are significantly less likely to work in management and executive positions compared to White men with similar qualifications. However, Asian men are not underrepresented in other high-paying, non-leadership occupations, suggesting this is a phenomenon unique to leadership occupations. Furthermore, these gaps are only present among East Asian and Southeast Asian men, while South Asian men do not differ from White men in their likelihood of working in leadership occupations. I examine several mechanisms and find no evidence that gaps are driven by racial differences in preferences for leadership positions, selection into self-employment, intergenerational transmission, immigration recency, ethnic attrition, spousal characteristics, or geographic sorting.

This article explores the complex interplay between deforestation policies and foreign influence, using a game theoretical model to analyze geopolitical factors influencing forest conservation decisions in countries with significant rainforests. The model highlights the conflicting interests of foreign powers – one aiming for economic benefits from agriculture and the other advocating for forest preservation to protect environmental services. The paper demonstrates how domestic political dynamics and economic shocks from the international economic influence regulatory decisions on deforestation in the shadow of foreign influence. This understanding is crucial for formulating strategies that balance developmental needs and global environmental concerns.

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.