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Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach is that it allows for the integration of experiments, which require interaction among the participants, with a survey of non-interacting respondents in a smooth and inexpensive way. We illustrate the power of our approach with the analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Germany by combining representative survey data with representative behavioral data from a social dilemma experiment. We identify which survey questions intended to elicit people�s trust correlate well with behaviorally exhibited trust in the experiment. People above the age of 65, highly skilled workers and people living in bigger households exhibit less trusting behavior. Foreign citizens, Catholics and people favoring the Social Democratic Party or the Christian Democratic Party exhibit more trust. People above the age of 65 and those in good health behave more trustworthy or more altruistically, respectively. People below the age of 35, the unemployed and people who say they are in favor of none of the political parties behave less trustworthy or less altruistically, respectively.

We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a charity focusing on poverty reduction solicited donations from prior donors and either announced a matching grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or made no mention of a match. In the second field experiment, the same charity sent direct mail solicitations to individuals who had not previously donated to the charity, and tested whether naming the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the matching donor was more effective than not identifying the name of the matching donor. The first experiment demonstrates that the matching grant condition generates more and larger donations relative to no match. The second experiment shows that providing a credible quality signal by identifying the matching donor generates even more and larger donations than not naming the matching donor. Importantly, the treatment effects persist long after the matching period, and the quality signal is quite heterogeneous--the Gates' effect is much larger for prospective donors who had a record of giving to "poverty-oriented" charities. These two pieces of evidence support our model of quality signals as a key mechanism through which matching gifts inspire donors to give.

The extent to which individuals discount the future and whether they discount in a time-consistent fashion is an important determinant of their life outcomes. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that direct exposure to violence substantially increases present bias – choice of the smaller, immediate reward over the larger, later reward. We demonstrate that providing individuals with a delay between information about the choice and the choice itself mitigates the differences in behavior between those who were exposed to violence and those who were not. Our findings suggest that enforcing a cooling off period between income notification and consumption opportunities may help generate more patient choices and mitigate the elevated impulsivity of individuals that have experienced violence. We measure our treatment effects both in reduced-form as well as in the form of structural estimates of a quasi-hyperbolic discounting function to enable comparison with measures of other types of time inconsistency and a welfare evaluation of the treatment effect. Our results have implications for policies aimed at alleviating the deleterious effects of present bias and the role of deliberation in the structure of commitment contracts.

We conducted large-scale lost letter experiments in Beijing, a megacity with more than 21 million residents, to test if the observed altruistic attribute of the letter recipient would induce more passersby to return the lost letters. The treatment letters were addressed to a nationally renowned charitable organization in China, while the control letters were intended to an invented individual. A total of 832 ready-to-be-posted letters were distributed in 208 communities across eight districts in the city. The overall return rate was only about 13%. Yet, the return rate of the treatment letters (17%) was nearly twice as high as that of the control letters (9%). The finding adds large-scale field experiment evidence in support of the interdependent other-regarding preferences theory. In addition, we also found that the lost letters were more likely to be returned if they were dropped in communities with a relatively higher income or a postal box located closer.

There has been little systematic study of the mechanisms typically used to raise money for charity. One of the most common is the simple raffle in which participants purchase chances to win a prize at a constant price. We conduct a field experiment randomly assigning participants to four raffle treatments to examine the effectiveness of alternative incentive schemes designed to encourage either participation or volume. Our results confirm the importance of incentives in that we find revenue gains are available on both margins. Our experiment, and others like it, illustrates the power of field experiments to inform fundraising choices.

This study experimentally investigates gender quotas in light of peer review. We investigate competitions with and without gender quotas and a peer review process that allows for sabotage. Our findings show that the possibility of peer sabotage renders the gender quota ineffective in encouraging women to enter tournaments. Moreover, we provide evidence of a severe backlash against women, as they become targets of sabotage under gender quotas. Interestingly, this is the result of women focusing on sabotaging each other while men sabotage indiscriminately. Our results have implications for the use of quotas to mitigate the underrepresentation and underperformance of minority groups in environments in which peer sabotage is possible. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2772 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Development economists have considered physical infrastructure to be a precondition for industrialization and economic development. Yet, two issues remain to be addressed in the literature. First, while proper identification of the causal effectiveness of infrastructure in reducing poverty is important, experimental evaluation, such as randomized control trials (RCT)-based evaluation, is difficult in the context of large-scale infrastructure. Second, while micro studies so far have focused on the nexus between infrastructure and certain types of poverty outcomes such as income, poverty, health, education, and other individual socio-economic outcomes, to better interpret a wide variety of micro-level infrastructure evaluation results using either experimental or non-experimental methods, the role of infrastructure should be placed in a broader context. To bridge these gaps, we augment the existing review articles on the same topic, such as Estache (2010), Hansen, Andersen, and White, (2012), and World Bank (2012) by addressing these two remaining issues. First, while forming a counterfactual is often difficult for impact evaluation of infrastructure, engineering constraints beyond human manipulation can allow people to adopt quasi-experimental methods of impact evaluation. Second, evaluators can adopt, for example, a hybrid method of natural and artefactual field experiments to elicit the role of infrastructure in facilitating the complementarity of the market, state, and community mechanisms.

This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow- up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). There are pronounced gender effects strongly favoring boys, although there are also effects for girls. Dynamic mediation analyses show a significant role played by improved childhood traits, above and beyond the effects of experimentally enhanced adult socioeconomic status. These results show the potential of early life interventions for promoting health.

Despite the widespread occurrence of humanitarian emergencies such as epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods and violent conflict and despite the significant financial resources devoted to humanitarian assistance, systematic learning from such interventions using rigorous theory-based impact evaluations is very rare. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which scientific impact evaluation methods can provide evidence to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in humanitarian action. This paper explores the methodological options and challenges associated with generating high quality evidence needed to answer key questions about the performance of humanitarian assistance, including whether assistance is reaching the right people, at the right time, is bringing about the desired changes in their lives (effectiveness) and is being delivered in the right doses, ways and with manageable costs (efficiency). With the help of six case studies and drawing on real-life examples from the small but growing academic literature, we demonstrate how impact evaluation methods can be used successfully and in an ethical manner to improve humanitarian assistance. A key lesson from our review is that it pays to be prepared. Much information is being collected these days about the risks of various emergencies unfolding, be they sudden onset or slow onset emergencies. Hence national actors and international donors can prepare for these events and for conducting meaningful impact evaluations. Given the overwhelming needs and the lack of funds, doing more with limited resources is a key challenge for humanitarian assistance and impact evaluation is one way of achieving this.

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different economic environments. We begin by developing a simple model that highlights the channels through which one can increase or decrease dishonest acts. We lend empirical insights into this model by using an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child rather than the parent. In this spirit, there is also an interesting effect of children on parents’ behavior: in the child’s presence, parents act more honestly, but there are gender differences. Parents act more dishonestly in front of sons than daughters. This finding has the potential of shedding light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults.

This study analyzes the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by 55 percent. The share of older test takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the quantity and composition of students, there are robustly positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a setting where expanded access could strain limited resources and reduce school quality. The findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in low-income countries like The Gambia.

In this paper, I experimentally examine the employment opportunities of Austrians with and without migration background. Applications of candidates with a Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Nigerian and no migration background are sent in response to job openings. Previous experiments have indicated ethnicity via the name of an applicant, however employers may not always correctly perceive this signal. Since photographs are a requirement for applications in the German speaking context, this study uses a novel approach to signal ethnic background and employs carefully matched photos as distinct visual cues. While results document employment discrimination for all groups with migration background, it is most pronounced for applicants with an African, i.e. Nigerian, background. To explain why and when discrimination occurs, a battery of firm and job specific characteristics are examined (e.g. whether team or customer contact is part of the job description). However, these help little to explain the actual level of discrimination. Discrimination in Austria therefore seems to be a general phenomenon driven by employers’ preferences that is barely affected by situational variables.

How do peers influence the impact of incentives? Despite much work on incentives, little is known about the spillover effects of incentives. We investigate two mechanisms by which these effects can occur: through peers' actions and peers' incentives. In a field experiment on snack choice (grapes versus cookies), we randomize who receives incentives, the fraction of peers incentivized, and whether or not it can be observed that peers' choices are incentivized among over 1,500 children in the school lunchroom. Incentives increase the likelihood of initially choosing grapes. However, peer spillover effects can be large enough to undo these positive effects.

Deviations from heteronormativity affect labour market dynamics. Hierarchies of sexual orientation can result in job dismissals, wage discrimination, and the failure to promote gay and lesbian individuals to top ranks. In this paper, I report on a field experiment (144 job-seekers and their correspondence with 5,549 firms) that tested the extent to which sexual orientation affects the labour market outcomes of gay and lesbian job-seekers in the United Kingdom. Their minority sexual orientations, as indicated by job-seekers' participation in gay and lesbian university student unions, negatively affected their workplace prospects. The probability of gay (lesbian) applicants receiving an invitation for an interview was 5.0% (5.1%) lower than that for heterosexual male (female) applicants. In addition, gays (lesbians) received invitations for interviews by firms that paid salaries that were 1.9% (1.2%) lower than those paid by firms that invited heterosexual male (female) applicants for interviews. In addition, in male- (female-) dominated occupations, gay men (lesbians) received fewer invitations for interviews than their non-gay (non-lesbian) counterparts. Furthermore, gay men (lesbians) also received fewer invitations to interview for positions in which masculine (feminine) personality traits were highlighted in job applications and at firms that did not provide written equal opportunity standards, suggesting that the level of discrimination depends partly on the personality traits that employers seek and on organisation-level hiring policies. I conclude that heteronormative discourse continues to reproduce and negatively affect the labour market prospects of gay men and lesbians.

We present results from a field experiment designed to measure the importance of managerial commitment to a contract within a firm that pays its workers piece rates. In the tree planting industry the piece rate paid to workers is determined as a function of the difficulty of the terrain to be planted. During the experiment, workers began planting a terrain at a trial piece rate, but were told this rate would be revised upwards if, after a few work days, average average productivity was below that observed on a similar (control) terrain on which the firm had committed to the contract. Our results suggest that worker productivity was 20% to 40% lower in the absence of commitment. The reduction was less pronounced when workers had less time to benefit from any subsequent increase in the piece rate. This provides support for models of worker turnover as a means of overcoming ratchet effects.

Previous empirical studies have shown that solo entrepreneurs benefit from having balanced skills: Jacks-of-All-Trades (JATs) are better entrepreneurs than specialists are. Nowadays however, the majority of entrepreneurs start up and run ventures together in teams. In this paper we test whether the effect of more balanced skills is also positive in a team of entrepreneurs. We also explore whether (a lack of) individual balanced skills can be substituted by combining the skills of various specialists within one team. Our field experiment studies teams of children participating in an entrepreneurship education program. Based on pupils' precisely measured level of verbal and mathematical ability, we exogenously compose 179 teams separated into four different types: JAT teams, math-specialist teams, verbal-specialist teams and mixed specialist teams. Our results show that balanced skills are beneficial to team performance, and that it is hard to substitute individual balanced skills by combining different specialists within one team.

Land conflicts in developing countries are costly. An important policy goal is to create respect for borders. This often involves mandatory, expensive interventions. We propose a new policy design, which in theory promotes neighborly relations at low cost. A salient feature is the option to by-pass regulation through consensus. The key idea combines the insight that social preferences transform social dilemmas into coordination problems with the logic of forward induction. As a first, low-cost pass at empirical evaluation, we conduct an experiment among farmers in the Ethiopian highlands, a region exhibiting features typical of countries where borders are often disputed. Our results suggest that a low-cost land delimitation based on neighborly recognition of borders could deliver a desired low-conflict situation if accompanied by an optional higher cost demarcation process.

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This correlation is only present for daughters. We show that a measure of parental involvement is a strong moderator of the association between mothers’ and daughters’ risk tolerance. These findings support a role for socialization in the intergenerational transmission of preferences that predict economic behaviour.

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to the primary donation decision, namely, how much to contribute to the charitable cause. The second relates to an "add-on" decision of how much to contribute to supporting the online platform itself. We find a strong impact of defaults on individual behavior: in each of our treatments, the modal positive contributions in both choice dimensions invariably correspond to the specified default amounts. Defaults, nevertheless, have no impact on aggregate donations. This is because defaults in the donation domain induce some people to donate more and others to donate less than they otherwise would have. In contrast, higher defaults in the secondary choice dimension unambiguously induce higher contributions to the online platform.

Strategy research often aims to empirically establish a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable such as firm performance. For many important strategy research questions, however, traditional empirical techniques are not sufficient to establish causal effects with high confidence. We propose that field experiments have potential to be used more widely in strategy research, leveraging methodological innovations from other disciplines to address persistent puzzles in the literature. We first review the advantages and disadvantages of using field experiments to answer questions in strategy. We define two types of experiments, "strategy field experiments" and "process field experiments," and present an original example of each variety. The first study explores the liability of foreignness and the second study tests theories regarding corporate culture.

We examine whether the predictions of minimax in zero-sum games holds under highly incentivized conditions with highly informed informed decision makers. We examine data from 3455 National Football League (NFL) games from the 2000 season through the 2012 season. We categorize every relevant play as either a rush or a pass. We find that, despite the predictions of minimax, the pass-rush mix exhibits negative serial correlation. In other words, given the conditions of the play, teams employ an exploitable strategy in that play types alternate more frequently than implied by an independent stochastic process. We also find that the efficacy of plays are affected by previous actions and previous outcomes in a manner that is not consistent with minimax. Our analysis suggests that teams could profit from more clustered play selections, which switch play type less frequently. Our results are consistent with the explanation that teams excessively switch play types in order to not be perceived as predictable.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore how both gender and facial attractiveness affect job candidates’ chances of obtaining interviews in China’s dynamic internet job board labor market. It examines how discrimination based on these attributes varies over occupation, location, and firms’ ownership type and size.Design/methodology/approach– The authors carry out a resume audit (correspondence) study. Resumes of fictitious applicants are first carefully crafted to make candidates appear equally productive in terms of their work histories and educational backgrounds. The authors control gender and facial attractiveness. The authors establish the facial attractiveness of candidate photos via an online survey. In total, 24,192 applications are submitted to 12,096 job postings across four occupations in six Chinese cities. Callbacks are carefully tracked and recorded. Discrimination is estimated by calculating the differences in the rates of callbacks for interviews received by individuals whose applications vary only in terms of facial attractiveness and gender. The authors reuse the same resumes repeatedly through this project such that names and photos of each of the candidates: attractive man, attractive woman, unattractive man, and unattractive woman is attached to each resume hundreds of times for each occupation in each city.Findings– The authors find sizable differences in the interview callback rates of attractive and unattractive job candidates. Job candidates with unattractive faces need to put in 33 percent more applications than their attractive counterparts to obtain the same number of interview callbacks. Women are preferred to men in three of the four occupations. Women, on average need put in only 91 percent as many applications as men to obtain the same number of interview callbacks.Research limitations/implications– The analysis of this paper focusses on only four different occupations. Its scope is also limited to exploring only the first part of the hiring process – obtaining a job interview. Furthermore, its fictitious applicants are all young people, approximately 25 years old. It would be useful to explore how gender and facial attractiveness affect candidates’ chances of landing a job after getting an interview.Originality/value– This paper contributes to and expands the literature on hiring through China’s internet job boards. It also contributes to the literature on the role of facial attractiveness in hiring.

In this paper, we examine the determinants of self-selection into a vocational training program in India. To do this we combine data from an artefactual field experiment with survey data collected from the targeted community. We find that applicants and non-applicants differ in terms of socio-economic characteristics (measured using a survey), as well as selected behavioral traits (elicited using an artefactual field experiment). Even after controlling for a range of socio-economic characteristics, we find that individuals who have higher tolerance for risk, and are more competitive, are more likely to apply to the training program. This suggests that focusing only on the socio-economic and demographic characteristics might not be sufficient to fully explain selection into the program. Participants’ behavioral traits are also crucial in influencing take-up rates in such programs. Our results suggest that as a methodology, there is valuable information to be gained by dissecting the black box of unobservables using data on behavioral traits.

We study the effect of unannounced recognition on performance with a field experiment involving first-year Dutch university students attending tutorials as part of a compulsory course. Our treatment, given in randomly selected tutorial groups, was to publicly recognize students who scored within the top 30% of their respective group on the first of the two midterm exams. The overall treatment effect on the second midterm grade is 0.03s ( s = grade standard deviation) for the recipients of recognition, and 0.15s for the non-recipients, both statistically insignificant. The effect for the non-recipients increases with class attendance (itself unaffected by our treatment) and proximity to the cutoff grade for recognition, reaching a significant 0.55s for the 23% of the non-recipients who attended at least 12 out of 13 classes and were within the first quartile of the distance to cutoff. We argue that conformity to performance norm is among the forces shaping the effects we observe.

We develop and model a two-stage incentivized intervention to promote pro-sociality. In the first stage, participants are incentivized to complete a compound task consisting of a targeted pro-social activity and a complement activity. In the second stage, participants are incentivized to complete repeatedly only the complement activity. The model predicts that, conditional on compliance with the first-stage compound task, intrinsic interest in the target activity is promoted regardless of compliance with the second-stage task. To test this we design and implement a field experiment on volunteering. The results are consistent with our model. Moreover, in the one year subsequent to our experiment, those who participated in our compound-task mechanism reported volunteering systematically more than those who participated in alternative mechanisms we investigated. Our approach has useful implications for promoting positive individual and social outcomes in many behavioral domains. Length: 41

This study investigates the differences in four aspects of job satisfaction between gay men/lesbians and heterosexuals. The analysis results suggest that gay men and lesbians are less satisfied with their jobs, by all job satisfaction measures, than heterosexual employees, all other factors being held constant. Gay men and lesbians who have disclosed their sexual orientation at their present job are more satisfied with their jobs than those who have not. In addition, gay men and lesbians who disclosed their sexual orientation at their current workplace longer ago are more satisfied with their jobs than gay men and lesbians who disclosed their sexual orientation more recently. Moreover, adverse mental health symptoms have the same negative impact on employees' job satisfaction regardless of sexual orientation. Furthermore, gay men and lesbians receive lower wages than comparable heterosexual employees. Whilst, the wage gap due to sexual orientation is greater in the group of very dissatisfied men than in the group of very satisfied men, and gay men and lesbians who have disclosed their sexual orientation at their present job receive lower wages than those who have not, but they still have higher levels of job satisfaction. It seems that the effect of disclosure on job satisfaction is the net effect of the connections between disclosure and job satisfaction.

This paper evaluates the impact of an unexpected temporary hiring credit targeted at workers paid below 1.6 times the minimum wage in firms with less than 10 employees in France from December 2008 to December 2009. Using rich administrative data covering all French firms, we find that the program has had a strong and rapid impact on employment. The net cost per job created for the government was around zero. The employment effect was stronger in areas where recruitment was easier. Although the hiring credit was not conditional on net job creation, it did not increase churning of workers. Nevertheless, we estimate that a credit conditional on net job creation above the employment growth threshold of -1%, would have maximized job creation, and created about 4 times more jobs, at constant budget, provided that take-up had remained the same.

To read the most recent version of the discussion paper click here . The provision of non-pecuniary incentives in education is a topic that has received much scholarly attention lately. Our paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the effectiveness of grade incentives in increasing student performance. We perform a direct comparison of the two most commonly used grading practices: the absolute (i.e., criterion-referenced) and the relative (i.e., norm-referenced) grading schemes in a large-scale field experiment at a university. We hypothesize that relative grading, by creating a rank-order tournament in the classroom, provides stronger incentives for male students than absolute grading. In the full sample, we find weak support for our hypothesis. Among the more motivated students we find evidence that men indeed score significantly higher on the test when graded on a curve. Female students, irrespective of their motivation, do not increase their scores under relative grading. Since women slightly outperform men under absolute grading, grading on a curve actually narrows the gender gap in performance.

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control groups. Employees in treatment teams received rewards if their ideas were approved. Nothing changed for employees in control teams. Our main finding is that rewards substantially increased the quality of ideas submitted. Further, rewards increased participation in the suggestion system, but decreased the number of ideas per participating employee, with zero net effect on the total quantity of ideas. The broader participation base persisted even after the reward was discontinued, suggesting habituation. We find no evidence for motivational crowding out. Our findings suggest that rewards can improve innovation and creativity, and that there may be a tradeoff between the quantity and quality of ideas.

Theory predicts that entrepreneurs have distinct attitudes towards risk and uncertainty, but empirical evidence is mixed. To better understand the unique behavioral characteristics of entrepreneurs and the causes of these mixed results, we perform a large ‘lab-in- the-field’ experiment comparing entrepreneurs to managers – a suitable comparison group – and employees (n=2288) . The results indicate that entrepreneurs perceive themselves as less risk averse than managers and employees, in line with common wisdom. However, when using experimental incentivized measures, the differences are subtler. Entrepreneurs are only found to be unique in their lower degree of loss aversion, and not in their risk or ambiguity aversion. This combination of results might be explained by our finding that perceived risk attitude is not only correlated to risk aversion but also to loss aversion. Overall, we therefore suggest using a broader definition of risk that captures this unique feature of entrepreneurs; their willingness to risk losses., Fourth wave feminists are currently seeking to bring an end to The Sun’s Page 3, a British institution infamous for featuring a topless female model daily. This paper investigates the No More Page 3 (NMP3) campaign through which feminist activists have sought to disrupt the institutionalized objectification of women more generally, and endeavour to transform a corporate arena of citizenship (focused solely on organisational activities) constructed by British retailer The Co-operative into a public arena of citizenship (focused on issues of social good more generally). Building upon insights from the institutional work and political corporate social responsibility literatures, we document the manner in which feminist activists have used The Co- operative’s social media site to publicly disrupt entrenched gender norms. Through identifying symbiotic yet competing discourses we discover themes of disruption and maintenance amongst and between interlocutors, facilitated by The Co-operative’s arena of citizenship and its notion of suspended discourse. Our analysis contributes to the institutional work literature by demonstrating the mutual need for disruption to ‘meet’ or contest maintenance work in corporate practice, and to the political corporate social responsibility literature by demonstrating the more nuanced and de- centralised role of corporations in public arenas of citizenship and within society.

This study assesses hiring discrimination based on disclosed depression. We send out pairs of job applications from fictitious unemployed candidates to real vacancies in Belgium. Within each pair, one candidate cites depression as the reason for her/his unemployment, whereas the other candidate reveals no reason for unemployment. Overall, the hypothesis that applicants disclosing former depression are treated unfavourably is rejected. However, if we break up the data by the gender of the recruiter, we see that revealing former depression as a reason for unemployment is rewarded by female recruiters, whereas it affects the hiring decisions made by male recruiters in a non-positive way.

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This study estimates the stigma effect of unemployment and overeducation within one framework. We conduct a randomised field experiment in which we send out trios of fictitious job applications, from male candidates with no relevant work experience, to real vacancies. One candidate graduated just a few months before the application, the two others graduated a year earlier and had been unemployed or underemployed since that time. By monitoring the subsequent callback, we find evidence of a larger stigma effect of unemployment than overeducation. The stigma effect of overeducation is found to occur for permanent contract jobs but not for temporary ones. ispartof: De Economist vol:167 issue:1 pages:1-21 status: published

We discuss the contribution of the experimental literature to the understanding of both traditional and previously unexplored dimensions of gender differences and discuss their bearings on labor market outcomes. Experiments have offered new findings on gender discrimination, and while they have identified a bias against hiring women in some labor market segments, the discrimination detected in field experiments is less pervasive than that implied by the regression approach. Experiments have also offered new insights into gender differences in preferences: women appear to gain less from negotiation, have lower preferences than men for risk and competition, and may be more sensitive to social cues. These gender differences in preferences also have implications in group settings, whereby the gender composition of a group affects team decisions and performance. Most of the evidence on gender traits comes from the lab, and key open questions remain as to the source of gender preferences – nature versus nurture, or their interaction – and their role, if any, in the workplace.

We present the results from a natural experiment in which single mothers on welfare were stimulated to find a job. Two policy instruments were introduced: an earnings disregard and job creation. The experiment was performed at the level of municipalities in The Netherlands, a country with relatively high benefits and low incentives for single mothers to leave welfare for work. In our analysis, we make a distinction between native and immigrant welfare recipients. For immigrant single mothers and some groups of native single mothers we find a positive employment effect of an earnings disregard. Job creation in addition to the earnings disregard increased working hours for some groups of single mothers. Although the outflow from welfare was not affected, welfare expenditures were reduced.

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers’ performance is substantially higher for the same total wage when their wage is increased in two steps as opposed to a single increase at the outset. Moreover, workers are more honest and are more willing to do voluntary extra work after surprising wage increases compared to a baseline condition without increases.

Many governments have spent much of the past decade trying to extend a helping hand to informal businesses by making it easier and cheaper for them to formalize. Much less effort has been devoted to raising the costs of remaining informal, through increasing enforcement of existing regulations. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in order to test which government actions work in getting informal firms to register. Firms were randomized to a control group or one of four treatment groups: the first received information about how to formalize; the second received this information and free registration costs along with the use of an accountant for a year; the third group was assigned to receive an enforcement visit from a municipal inspector; while the fourth group was assigned to have a neighboring firm receive an enforcement visit to see if enforcement has spillovers. The analysis finds zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments, and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. Estimates of the impact of actually receiving an inspection give a 21 to 27 percentage point increase in the likelihood of formalizing. The results show most informal firms will not formalize unless forced to do so, suggesting formality offers little private benefit to them. But the tax revenue benefits to the government of bringing firms of this size into the formal system more than offset the costs of inspections.

We investigate the determinants of giving in a lab-in-the-field experiment with large stakes. Study participants in urban Mozambique play dictator games where their counterpart is the closest person to them outside their household. When given the option, dictators do a large fraction of giving in kind (in the form of goods) rather than cash. In addition, they share more in total when they have the option of giving in kind, compared to giving that can only be in cash. Qualitative post-experiment responses suggest that this effect is driven by a desire to control how recipients use gifted resources. Standard economic determinants such as the rate of return to giving and the size of the endowment also affect giving, but the effects of even large changes in these determinants are significantly smaller than the effect of the in-kind option. Our results support theories of giving where the utility of givers depends on the composition (not just the level) of gift-recipient expenditures, and givers thus seek control over transferred resources.

In this paper, a correspondence testing experiment is conducted to examine sexual orientation discrimination against lesbians in Germany. Applications for four fictional female characters are sent out in response to job advertisements: a heterosexual single, a married heterosexual, a single lesbian and a lesbian who is in a ‘same-sex registered partnership’. Different results are obtained for the two cities investigated, Munich and Berlin. While single lesbians and lesbians in a registered partnership are equally discriminated in comparison to the heterosexual women in the city of Munich, no discrimination based on sexual orientation has been found in Berlin. Furthermore, for a subset of our data we can compare the effects of a randomized versus a paired testing approach, which suggests that under certain conditions, due to increased conspicuity, the paired testing approach may lead to biased results.

We conduct a field experiment among 189 stores of a retail chain to study dynamic incentive effects of relative performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores from the control group over the course of four weeks. Treatment stores received weekly feedback on relative performance. Control stores were kept unaware of their involvement, so that their performance generates exogenous variation in the relative performance of the treatment stores. As predicted by theory, treatment stores that lag far behind do not respond to the incentives, while the responsiveness of treatment stores close to winning a bonus increases in relative performance. On average, the introduction of the relative performance pay scheme does not lead to higher performance. This discussion paper has led to a publication in Labour Economics, 2014, 28 (1-13).

Background: Preferences of both Alzheimer patients and their spouse caregivers are related to a willingness-to-pay (WTP) measure which is used to test for the presence of mutual (rather than conventional unilateral) altruism. Methods: Contingent valuation experiments were conducted in 2000 – 2002, involving 126 Alzheimer patients and their caregiving spouses living in the Zurich metropolitan area (Switzerland). WTP values for three hypothetical treatments of the demented patient were elicited. The treatment Stabilization prevents the worsening of the disease, bringing dementia to a standstill. Cure restores patient health to its original level. In No burden, dementia takes its normal course while caregiver’s burden is reduced to its level before the disease. Results: The three different types of therapies are reflected in different WTP values of both caregivers and patients, suggesting that moderate levels of Alzheimer’s disease still permit clear expression of preference. According to the WTP values found, patients do not rank Cure higher than No burden, implying that their preferences are entirely altruistic. Caregiving spouses rank Cure before Burden, reflecting less than perfect altruism which accounts for some 40 percent of their to-tal WTP. Still, this constitutes evidence of mutual altruism. Conclusions: The evidence suggests that WTP values reflect individuals’ preferences even in Alzheimer patients. The values found suggest that an economically successful treatment should provide relief to caregivers, with its curative benefits being of secondary importance.

We employ a natural field experiment to study the extent and nature of racial discrimination in Queensland, Australia. Mimicking the historical case of Rosa Parks who was denied seating in a bus because she was black, an important moment for the U.S. civil rights movement, we sent trained testers who differed in ethnic appearance to bus stops asking the driver for a free ride on the basis that their bus pass was faulty (which it was). In total, we obtained 1,552 observations of testers either allowed a free ride or not, in each case recording the characteristics of the bus driver, the tester, and the circumstances. We find strong evidence of discrimination against black-skinned individuals. In the baseline scenario, white testers were accepted during 72% of the interactions versus only 36% for black testers. Indian testers were let on 51% of the time and Asian testers (mainly Chinese) were let on 73% of the time. Favors were more likely to be granted when the bus driver and tester were of the same ethnicity, and when there were fewer people in the bus. Patriotic appearance matters in that testers wearing army uniforms were accepted at a rate of 97% if they were white and 77% if they were black. Status appearance also mattered in that black testers dressed in business attire were just as likely to be favored as casually dressed white testers. When bus drivers were confronted with hypothetical baseline scenarios using photos taken of the real testers, 86% responded they would let on the black individual, more than double the actual number accepted, indicating dishonest self-reporting on this topic.

More than twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, do citizens from former Communist countries still exhibit attitudes and preferences with regard to the welfare state and income redistribution that differ from those in the West? This paper seeks to answer this question for Germany after reunification using not only survey data on attitudes but also evidence on preferences from a discrete choice experiment, both based on a representative sample. In a first step, we revisit the empirical evidence, compare our results to those of Alesina and Fuchs-Schundeln (2007) and test whether convergence of attitudes has yet been achieved. In a second step, we apply an advanced method to investigate preferences for redistribution in terms of willingness to pay. This framework is more in line with standard public choice theory as individuals are forced to overcome trade-offs and are exposed to take their inherent budget constraint into account when voicing their opinion on redistribution. The results are quite mixed. While East Germans seem to desire a higher amount of redistribution than West Germans, they are not willing to contribute more through taxation. This finding has important implications for social policy in reunified Germany.

How does effort respond to being graded and ranked? This paper examines the effects of non-financial incentives on test performance. We conduct a randomized field experiment on more than a thousand sixth graders in Swedish primary schools. Extrinsic non-financial incentives play an important role in motivating highly skilled students to exert more effort. We find significant differences in test scores between the intrinsically motivated control group and three of four extrinsically motivated treatment groups. The only treatment not increasing test performance is criterion-based grading on an A–F scale, which is the typical grading method. Test performance is significantly higher if employing rank-based grading or giving students a symbolic reward. The motivational strengths of the non-financial incentives differ across the test score distribution, across the skill distribution, with peer familiarity, and with respect to gender. Boys are only motivated by rank-based incentives, while girls are also motivated by receiving a symbolic reward. Rank-based grading and symbolic rewards tend to crowd out intrinsic motivation for students with low skills, while girls also respond less to rank-based incentives if tested with less familiar peers.

We analyze data from the Bank of Italy's most recent recruitment rounds, in an effort to explain why men consistently score better than women. We focus on the pre-screening stage of the hiring process, a multiple-choice test, where men acquire a preliminary advantage. After observing a higher incidence of questions left blank for women, and a negative correlation between the share of unanswered questions and the final score, we run an experiment on scoring formulas to check for implicit discrimination linked to risk aversion; no evidence of such discrimination is found. Based on a follow-up questionnaire, we also study the role of composition effects. Nearly 40 per cent of the gap in test scores depends on the quality of the candidates: male graduates appear to self-select into the applicant pool more frequently than females do. A further 34 per cent is explained by the fact that the same characteristics tend to produce different effects based on gender. The remaining 26 per cent remains unexplained.

In this paper, we investigate the real demand for climate protection when the purely individual perspective of existing revealed preference studies is relaxed. This is achieved in two treatments; first, we determine the information subjects receive about the demand revealed by other subjects in a similar decision making situation, second, collective action is implemented whereby all subjects are required to purchase the group’s median quantity at a given price. Participants in the experiment were offered the opportunity to contribute to climate protection by purchasing European Union Allowances. Allowances purchased were withdrawn from the European Emissions Trading Scheme. In our experiment, information about other subjects’ behaviour has no treatment effect on the demand for climate protection. Under collective action however, the probability of purchasing allowances is higher compared to the reference treatment situation, an individual contribution mechanism. Furthermore, we observe a strong correlation between subjects’ demand and their expectations about other participants’ behaviour. When collective action is not available, subjects’ expectations are consistent with free rider behaviour.

The endowment effect, the tendency to value possessions more than non-possessions, is a well-known departure from rational choice and has been replicated in numerous settings. We investigate the universality of the endowment effect, its evolutionary signi�耀 cance, and its dependence on environmental factors. We experimentally test for the endowment effect in an isolated and evolutionarily relevant population of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza Bushmen of Northern Tanzania. We �耀 nd that Hadza living in isolated regions do not display the endowment effect, while Hadza living in a geographic region with increased exposure to modern society and markets do display the endowment effect. (JEL C93, D12, O15) This paper uses a natural experiment in a hunter-gatherer population to provide evidence on three questions: the universality of a behavioral bias (the endowment effect), its dependence on cultural factors, and its evolutionary signi�耀 cance. Systematic deviations from rational behavior have been extensively documented, along with their importance for market outcomes. Yet, evidence on the three questions above is sparse, especially for biases in economic decisions. First, most experiments are conducted in industrialized societies, and in particular on college campuses, so biases could be the result of shared experiences as opposed to innate features of human behavior. Second, cross-cultural experiments typically compare very different groups, making it hard to attribute differences in behavior to a speci�耀 c cultural factor due to omitted variable bias (Roth et al. 1991; Henrich et al. 2001, 2006). Third, while many contributions in economics have proposed evolutionary

This paper evaluates the impact of beauty on employability, stressing the first stage of the hiring process. In particular, we studied the Italian labor market in order to ascertain whether there exists a preference for attractive applicants according to gender and racial characteristics. The sample analyzed consists of observations collected by sending 11008 curricula vitae (henceforth CVs) to firms looking for workers in response to advertised job postings.;Positive responses were obtained by 3278 CVs (almost 30% of the sample). We then compared response rates of different categories, obtaining the following results: those who receive the highest levels of positive responses are attractive subjects; most of the responses to plain subjects involve unqualified jobs; beauty appears to be essential for front clerical work; racial discrimination appears to be significant, but less so than discrimination based on physical features, especially for women.

We confront a representative sample of one 1,102 Dutch individuals with a series of incentivized investment decisions and also elicit their time preferences. There are two treatments that differ in the frequency at which individuals decide about the invested amount. The low frequency treatment stimulates decision makers to frame a sequence of risky decisions broadly rather than narrowly. We find that the framing effect is significantly larger for impatient than for patient individuals. This result is robust to controlling for various economic and demographic variables and for cognitive ability.

We analyze data from a field setting in which students can voluntarily participate in a dynamic group contest with feedback. We combine this information with a laboratory measure of competitiveness. We find that competitive groups perform worse overall. In addition, we find that participants react to intermediate performance: A better rank in a given period increases the number of points in the subsequent period, even after controlling for group and time fixed eects. The eect is significantly stronger for competitive than for non-competitive groups and we show that this dierence in the sensitivity to dynamic incentives can explain the overall negative eect of competitiveness on performance.

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test whether individuals interacting on Facebook are more likely to succumb to the conjunction fallacy when they post their answers publicly and are exposed to the answers of others. Using the experimental design in Kahneman and Tversky (1983), we find that the proportion of individuals violating the conjunction rule on Facebook is substantially lower than that reported by previous experiments conducted in the lab, regardless of whether responses are public or private. When responses are posted in a public form, however, the partic- ipation rate is substantially higher. The violation rate on Facebook is also significantly lower than the rate of violation from the same experiment run on Mechanical Turk, a popular online labor market, with monetary incentives. Adding a bonus for the correct answer reduces the violation rate on Mechanical Turk when answers are private, but not when they are public, suggesting that peer effects may indeed counteract the effect of monetary incentives. Our experiment casts doubts about the robustness of behavioral biases for the understanding of real life decisions in environments in which interaction is not anonymous and people are reputation conscious, and suggests the power of social networks to mitigate their effects