Choosing Your Object of Benevolence: A Field Experiment on Donation Options*

In a large natural field experiment, we explore the effect of providing donors with the opportunity of choosing the target country for their donations. We find that our treatment manipulation affects neither the average donation size nor the response rate. Only a small fraction of donors (3.5 percent) actually choose their object of benevolence. These donors give more than those who do not specify a recipient. However, based on previous donations, we can only provide indicative evidence that this might be a causal effect rather than a mere selection effect.     

Testing Social Preferences for an Economic “Bad”: An Artefactual Field Experiment*

We test for social preferences over a commodity in an artefactual field experiment using the random price voting mechanism. Subjects are university staff members, and the commodity is water “contaminated” by a sterilized cockroach. Our results suggest that social preferences exist with respect to commodities and “bads”, supporting a more general utility framework for social preferences. Our empirical test allows for the coexistence of three social‐preference models; our results support the models of Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and Charness and Rabin (2002), but not the model of Bolton and Ockenfels (2000). Also, we find that incorporating social preferences improves the efficiency of majority‐rules voting.     

Discrimination in Scientific Review: A Natural Field Experiment on Blind versus Non‐Blind Reviews*

Using papers submitted to an international conference on economics held in Sweden in 2008, we analyze how gender, as well as other characteristics of the authors and reviewers, affects the grading of these papers by the reviewers. Correcting for other variables, including the country and research field, as well as the academic level of the author, we focus on the difference in grades between blind and non‐blind review treatments. We find that non‐blind reviewing has little effect, and there is no significant evidence of gender discrimination. Furthermore, we do not find any significant difference between the average grading by female and male reviewers.     

Risk aversion,prudence and temperance: An experiment in gain and loss

We characterize the individual's attitude towards risk, prudence and temperance in the gain and loss domains. We analyze the links between the three features of preferences for a given domain and between domains for each feature of preferences. Consequently, the reflection effect, the mixed risk aversion and the risk apportionment, are key concepts of our study. We also display some determinants for risk aversion, prudence and temperance in each domain. To do this, we conducted a lab experiment with students eliciting risk aversion, prudence and temperance in the two domains, and collected information about each subject's characteristics.     

Compensating Wage Differentials for Schooling Risk in Denmark*

In this paper we analyse the association between wage differentials and risk using detailed information on length and type of education as seen in Danish administrative registers. Our contribution to the literature is that we distinguish between transitory (time‐series) and permanent (cross‐sectional) income shocks, and estimate the compensation for both sorts of risk. We find that wage risk in a given education cell is associated with higher wages, while skewness is associated with lower wages. As a robustness check, we see that ad hoc risk measures based on earnings‐mobility indicators confirm these findings.     

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

Abstract. This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany's labour market with a correspondence test. We send two similar applications to each of 528 advertisements for student internships, one with a Turkish‐sounding and one with a German‐sounding name. A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14%. Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant in smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24% more callbacks. Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidate's personality. We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination.     

Measuring subjective expectations in developing countries: A critical review and new evidence

The majority of economic decisions are forward-looking and thus involve expectations of future outcomes. Understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health, education, finance, migration, social protection, and many other areas. However, the majority of developing country surveys are static in nature and many do not elicit subjective expectations of individuals. Possible reasons given for not collecting this information include fears that poor, illiterate individuals do not understand probability concepts, that it takes far too much time to ask such questions, or that the answers add little value. This paper provides a critical review and new analysis of subjective expectations data from developing countries and refutes each of these concerns. We find that people in developing countries can generally understand and answer probabilistic questions, such questions are not prohibitive in time to ask, and the expectations are useful predictors of future behavior and economic decisions. The paper discusses the different methods used for eliciting such information, the key methodological issues involved, and the open research questions. The available evidence suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible and valuable, suggesting that it should be incorporated into more developing country surveys.     

Strategic Responses: A Survey Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms*

The responses given in opinion polls on future policy reforms reflect both subjective expectations and preferences. We disentangle these factors using data from a controlled survey experiment conducted in Germany. At the time of the experiment, an increased retirement age had been proposed as part of a pension reform. Thus, the survey respondents faced an incentive to give biased responses. By understating their expected work ability at the age of retirement, they could make the increase of the retirement age a less attractive policy option. We find evidence for such strategic response behavior, and this strategic bias appears to be stronger in former communist East Germany.     

Risk aversion in auctions with asymmetrically informed bidders: A “desensitizer” from uncertainty

In the context of first-price auctions with asymmetrically informed bidders, we show that risk aversion not only increases a player’s bid, but also makes him less sensitive to the probability that other bidders are informed about his private valuation.