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We use a randomized survey to study how discrimination affects parenting choices. In our survey, parents with young children choose between two public daycares, which are described by testimonials from other (fictitious) parents. The testifying parents in the first daycare describe a free play institution, which reflects a pro-typical Scandinavian 'permissive parenting' approach to childcare. The testifying parents in the second daycare describe a more structured daycare, which reflects an alternative approach to child care that is broadly consistent with 'paternalistic parenting'. We randomize the fictitious names of the testifying parents across respondents. We find bias against ethnic minorities among parents who prefer a structured child care institution but not among parents who prefer free play one. These biases are not reduced when we provide additional information on testifiers' professions. Our findings offer validation for a model of parenting where biases regarding discrimination are likely to come from parents preferring less permissive/more authoritarian methods of parenting.

We study parental daycare choice using a randomized online survey of parents in Copenhagen. The survey respondents were asked to choose between two daycares — structured vs. free-play. In describing these hypothetical choices, the survey used testimonials from (fictive) parents whose child allegedly attended the institution, and we randomized the names of the testifying parents across the sample so that some had typical Danes names, while other names were associated with ethnic minorities. Our main findings point towards discrimination against ethnic minorities. This finding is most pronounced among parents who prefer the structured institution. Adding information about the profession of the testifiers did not significantly alter signs of lower preferences for daycares with ethnic minority names, (cautiously) suggesting that this discrimination is taste-based rather than statistical. Finally, we asked the respondents to report a willingness to travel a further distance to get to their preferred daycare (structured or free-play, respectively). Our results show that willingness to travel to the preferred daycare is higher for parents who prefer the structured daycare when there was an ethnic minority name associated with the free-play daycare.

We study a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members' wealth accumulations. We compare two treatments in which subjects have opportunities to exchange free-form messages to one without such opportunities, finding that most subjects allocate far less to theft and most groups achieve much greater efficiency in the presence of communication. Ease of identifying who has engaged in theft varies across the two communication treatments, but is of minor importance to the outcome. We find several coding-amenable elements of message content to be statistically significant predictors of group and individual outcomes.

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries - Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different behaviors that correlate with country-level property security, trust and quality of government. Subjects from countries with higher levels of trust or perceptions of safety are more prone to abstain initially from theft and devote more resources to production, and subjects from countries with higher quality political institutions are more supportive of protecting property through compulsory taxation. This highlights the relevance of socio-political factors in determining countries' success in addressing collective action problems including safeguarding property rights.