An experimental study of prosocial motivation among criminals

The fact that criminal behavior typically has negative consequences for others provides a compelling reason to think that criminals lack prosocial motivation. This paper reports the results from two dictator game experiments designed to study the prosocial motivation of criminals. In a lab experiment involving prisoners, we find a striking similarity in the prosocial behavior of criminals and non-criminals, both when they interact with criminals and when they interact with non-criminals. Similarly, in an Internet experiment on a large sample from the general population, we find no difference in the prosocial behavior of individuals with and without a criminal record. We argue that our findings provide evidence of criminals being as prosocially motivated as non-criminals in an important type of distributive situations.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne ZusammenfassungÜbersetzt von Erich Schiff, Wien.Übersetzt von Paul Brüll, Wien     

The Role of Market Orientation and Entrepreneurial Orientation for New Product Development Performance in Manufacturing Firms

The overall purpose of this article is to examine the relationships between two strategic orientations and performance in new product development. The first orientation considered is market orientation; the second one considered is entrepreneurial orientation, which reflects a firm’s propensity to innovate, to be proactive, as well as its willingness to take risks. Drawing upon a sample of 224 mid-sized manufacturing firms, multiple regressions with and without interaction terms were used for testing seven hypotheses. The results show that a market orientation and innovativeness were positively related to performance in new product development, while proactiveness and risk taking show no such relationship. The results also show that neither product characteristics nor environmental characteristics moderate these relationships. In terms of implications, our results suggest that contradictory and to some extent paradoxical capabilities are needed to increase performance in new product development, and that the different components of an entrepreneurial orientation do not impact new product development performance equally.     

Public health insurance and optimal income taxation

If individuals differ not only in their inherent capacity to earn income, but also in the probability that they will fall ill, can subsidized public health insurance be justified on the grounds that it serves as an efficient tool to redistribute welfare? This question is analyzed in a model where the social welfare function is a weighted average of individual expected utilities, and where taxation is by a linear income tax. The answer is ‘yes’, except in certain special cases.     

Taxpayers' responsiveness to tax rate changes and implications for the cost of taxation in Sweden

Historically, labor supply elasticities have been used to evaluate tax policy and predict tax revenue effects. They are likely to underestimate taxpayers' response to tax rate changes, and hence to underestimate changes in potential tax revenues, however, because they measure only how taxpayers alter hours worked. Taxpayers can also respond to tax rate changes by altering, for instance, their work effort and form of compensation. An alternative measure that accounts for these responses as well as hours worked is the elasticity of taxable income. This paper estimates the elasticity of earned taxable income for Swedish taxpayers using two different approaches and a number of control variables and the 1990/1991 tax reform as a “natural experiment”. The preferred elasticity estimates fall in the range of 0.4–0.5, comparable with recent estimates for the U.S. and larger than most of the labor supply elasticity estimates used to evaluate tax policy in Scandinavia previously, which suggests that deadweight losses are two to three times higher than previously thought. JEL Classification H21 · H24 · H31 · J22     

Recreational Conflict Is Affective: The Case of Cross-Country Skiers and Snowmobiles

The authors conducted a field experiment to test the assumption that subjective feelings are important in recreation conflict. During a weekend, cross-country skiers in a popular recreation area were assigned randomly to an experimental group who were exposed to an operating snowmobile, and a control group who were not exposed. Both groups completed a self-report questionnaire to provide information on their subjective experiences during their outing. The experimental group answered the questions five to ten minutes after encountering a snowmobile. Participants were not informed about the connection between the snowmobile and the investigation, and the questions regarding effects were answered before any clues were given about snowmobiles being an issue. Results showed that relative to the control group, skiers who encountered a snowmobile had their affective quality significantly reduced. Moreover, encountering a single snowmobile had an effect on participants' beliefs about the extent to which noise from snowmobiles disturbed the quality of ski-touring in general.     

About FairTax

Intereconomics - Our research shows that in the ongoing discussion concerning ‘the social dimension of Europe’, it appears that there is much to gain if the tax policy interaction...     

Anders Lindstedt

Abstract

När Presidenten And. Lindstedt den 16 maj 1939 gick bort, blev vårt land en storman fattigare. En livsgärning av betydande mått hade slutförts. Många äro de omraden, som befruktats genom hans klara intellekt och konstruktiva förmåga. För de flesta är han väl närmast känd som den svenska socialförsäkringens skapare. Men även för den lagstiftning, som reglerar det enskilda försäkringsväsendents ekonomiska förhållanden, ha Lindstedts insatser varit grundläggande. Den nuvarande organisationen av den högre tekniska undervisningen i vårt land är i stor utsträckning hans verk. Åt de matematiska vetenskaperna och särskilt den celesta mekaniken ägnade han i yngre dagar flera djupgående undersökningar.