Papers - John A List

Greer K Gosnell, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet, causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for high-skilled workers in the developed world. In an eight-month field experiment measuring the productivity of captains in the commercial aviation sector, we test four distinct management practices: (i) performance monitoring; (ii) performance feedback; (iii) target setting; and (iv) prosocial incentives. We find that these management practices -particularly performance monitoring and target setting- significantly increase captains' productivity with respect to the targeted fuel-saving dimensions. We identify positive spillovers of the tested management practices on job satisfaction and carbon dioxide emissions, and captains overwhelmingly express desire for deeper managerial engagement. Both the implementation and the results of the study reveal an uncharted opportunity for management researchers to delve into the black box of firms and rigorously examine the determinants of productivity amongst skilled labor.

John A List, Rohen Shah

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In organizations, teams are ubiquitous. "Weakest Link" and "Best Shot" are incentive schemes that tie a group member's compensation to the output of their group's least and most productive member, respectively. In this paper, we test the impact of these incentive schemes by conducting two pilot RCTs (one in-person, one online), which included more than 250 graduate students in a graduate math class. Students were placed in study groups of three or four students, and then groups were randomized to either control, Weakest Link, or Best Shot incentives. We find evidence that such incentive approaches can affect test scores, both in-person and online.

Stefano DellaVigna, John A List, Ulrike Malmendier, Gautam Rao

Cited by*: 19 Downloads*: 71

Do men and women have different social preferences? Previous findings are contradictory. We provide a potential explanation using evidence from a field experiment. In a door-to-door solicitation, men and women are equally generous, but women become less generous when it becomes easy to avoid the solicitor. Our structural estimates of the social preference parameters suggest an explanation: women are more likely to be on the margin of giving, partly because of a less dispersed distribution of altruism. We find similar results for the willingness to complete an unpaid survey: women are more likely to be on the margin of participation.

Craig Gallet, John A List

Cited by*: 12 Downloads*: 4

Recent research has posited that, in advanced economies, there is a positive correlation between income inequality and development. Using a new unbalanced panel dataset for 71 countries from 1961 to 1992, we present evidence that supports this conjecture. Although many factors may be contributing to this renewed positive relationship between growth and inequality, one plausible explanation rests on the shift away from a manufacturing base towards a service base in most advanced economies.

Michael Hallsworth, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Ivo Vlaev

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 82

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK government as a case study to explore the 'omission bias' present in decision making with large stakes. Using a natural field experiment that generates nearly 40,000 observations, we find that repayment rates are roughly doubled when the act is reframed as one of commission rather than omission. We estimate that this reframing of the perceived nature of the action generated over $1.3 million of new yield. We find evidence that this behavior may result from a deliberate 'omission strategy', rather than a behavioral bias, as is often assumed in the literature. Our natural field experiment highlights that behavioral economics is much more than a series of empirical exercises to quench the intellectual curiosity of academics.

John A List, Daniel L Millimet

Cited by*: 20 Downloads*: 35

Assumptions of individual rationality and preference stability provide the foundation for a convenient and tractable modeling approach. While both of these assumptions have come under scrutiny in distinct literatures, the two lines of research remain disjointed. This study begins by explicitly linking the two literatures while providing insights into perhaps the central issue facing behavioral economics today: to what extent does market experience mitigate various forms of individual irrationality? We find considerable evidence that the market is a catalyst for rationality. The study then focuses on aggregate market outcomes by examining empirically whether individual rationality is a prerequisite for market efficiency. Using field data gathered from more than 380 subjects of age 6-18 in multi-lateral bargaining markets at a shopping mall, we find that the market is a filter of irrationality--even when markets are populated solely by irrational buyers, aggregate market outcomes quickly converge to neoclassical predictions.

John A List

Cited by*: 33 Downloads*: 10

Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990, and the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by nearly 60 percent from 1995 to 2005. This study provides a perspective on the economic interplay of three types of actors: donors, charitable organizations, and government. How much is given annually? Who gives? Who are the recipients of these gifts? Would changes in the tax treatment of charitable contributions lead to more or less giving? How can charitable institutions design mechanisms to generate the greatest level of gifts? What about the effectiveness of seed money and matching grants?

Richard Damania, Per Fredriksson , John A List

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 5

This study uses a three-stage common agency model to explore the linkages between trade policy, corruption and environmental policy in an imperfect market setting. We show that the effect of trade liberalization on the stringency of environmental policy depends critically on the level of corruption-in relatively corrupt countries, trade openness leads to more stringent environmental policy. In such countries, this interaction, therefore, lends trade liberalization a type of "multiplier effect," raising both economic growth and environmental policy stringency.

John A List

Cited by*: 120 Downloads*: 86

Empirical studies have provided evidence that discrimination exists in various markets, but they rarely allow the analyst to draw conclusions concerning the nature of discrimination. By combining data from bilateral negotiations in the sportscard market with complementary field experiments, this study provides a framework that amends this shortcoming. The experimental design, which includes data gathered from more than 1100 market participants, provides sharp findings: (i) there is a strong tendency for minorities to receive initial and final offers that are inferior to those received by majorities, and (ii) overall, the data indicate that the observed discrimination is not due to animus, but represents statistical discrimination.

Gary Charness, John A List, Aldo Rustichini, Anya Samek, Jeroen van de Ven

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to correctly attribute mental states to others, is important in social interactions. We evaluate the development of ToM in about 800 mostly disadvantaged children. We next conduct a field experiment with about 160 children in which we find that the low ToM rates for these disadvantaged children improve substantially in environments where the presence of other children is made salient. We see that ToM performance increases for both younger and older children in the treatment with strong salience, but that the treatment with weaker salience seems to be only effective in improving the ToM rates for older children.

Ufuk Akcigit, Fernando Alvarez, Stephane Bonhomme, George M Constantinides, Douglas W Diamond, Eugene F Fama, David W Galenson, Michael Greenstone, Lars Peter Hansen, Uhlig Harald, James J Heckman, Ali Hortacsu, Emir Kamenica, Greg Kaplan, Anil K Kashyap, Steven D Levitt, John A List, Robert E Lucas Jr., Magne Mogstad, Roger Myerson, Derek Neal, Canice Prendergast, Raghuram G Rajan, Philip J Reny, Azeem M Shaikh, Robert Shimer, Hugo F Sonnenschein, Nancy L Stokey, Richard H Thaler, Robert H Topel, Robert Vishny, Luigi Zingales

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 207

No abstract available

Shachar Kariv, Daniel J. Lee, John A List, Michael K Price

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82

We build on previous work in the charitable giving literature by examining not only how much subjects give to charity, but also which charities subjects prefer. We operationalize this choice in an artefactual field experiment with a representative sample of respondents. We then use these data to structurally model motives for giving. The novelty of this design allows us to ask several interesting questions regarding the choices one undertakes when deciding both whether and how much to give to charity. Further, we ask these questions in the context of a standard utility framework. Given the unique set up of this experiment, we also explore how these distributional preference parameters differ by charity choice and from what we have observed in the past. We find that there is more variation within demographics and charity types than across distributions.

Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt, John A List

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 98

Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Here we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We find sharp evidence that fishermen from individualistic societies are far more competitive than fishermen from collectivistic societies and that this difference emerges with work experience. These findings suggest that humans can evolve traits to specific needs, support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role for individual competitiveness, and provide evidence how individualistic and collectivistic societies shape economic behaviour.

Robert T Ammerman, Anne K Duggan, John A List, Lauren Supplee, Dana L Suskind

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

The goal of creating evidence-based programs is to scale them at sufficient breadth to support population-level improvements in critical outcomes. However, this promise is challenging to fulfill. One of the biggest issues for the field is the reduction in effect sizes seen when a program is taken to scale. This paper discusses an economic perspective that identifies the underlying incentives in the research process that lead to scale up problems and to deliver potential solutions to strengthen outcomes at scale. The principles of open science are well aligned with this goal. One prevention program that has begun to scale across the United States is early childhood home visiting. While there is a substantial impact research on home visiting, overall average effect size is .10 and a recent national randomized trial found attenuated effect sizes in programs implemented under real-world conditions. The paper concludes with a case study of the relevance of the economic model and open science in developing and scaling evidence-based home visiting. The case study considers how the traditional approach for testing interventions has influenced home visiting's evolution to date and how open science practices could have supported efforts to maintain impacts while scaling home visiting. It concludes by considering how open science can accelerate the refinement and scaling of home visiting interventions going forward, through accelerated translation of research into policy and practice.

John A List, Michael K Price

Cited by*: 14 Downloads*: 45

The economics literature suggests that enhanced social connection can increase trust amongst agents, which can ultimately lead to more efficient economic outcomes, including increased provision of public goods. This study provides a test of whether social connectedness (proxied via agent similarities in race and gender) influences giving to a charitable fundraiser. Using data gathered from more than 2000 households approached in an actual door-to-door fundraising drive, we find limited evidence of the importance of such social connections. A robust result in the data, however, is that our minority solicitors, whether approaching a majority or minority household, are considerably less likely to obtain a contribution, and conditional on securing a contribution, gift size is lower than their majority counterparts receive.

Omar Al-Ubaydli, John A List, Dana L Suskind

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether-and to what extent-insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up problem can lead to a vast waste of resources, a missed opportunity to improve people's lives, and a diminution in the public's trust in the scientific method's ability to contribute to policymaking. This study provides a theoretical lens to deepen our understanding of the science of how to use science. Through a simple model, we highlight three elements of the scale-up problem: (1) when does evidence become actionable (appropriate statistical inference); (2) properties of the population; and (3) properties of the situation. We argue that until these three areas are fully understood and recognized by researchers and policymakers, the threats to scalability will render any scaling exercise as particularly vulnerable. In this way, our work represents a challenge to empiricists to estimate the nature and extent of how important the various threats to scalability are in practice, and to implement those in their original research.

John A List, Fatemeh Momeni, Michael Vlassopoulos, Yves Zenou

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This study explores the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the spillover effects of an early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of a large sample of disadvantaged children in the United States. We document large spillover effects on the cognitive skills of children living near treated children, which amount to approximately 40% of the direct treatment effects. Interestingly, these spillover effects are localized and decrease with the spatial distance to treated neighbors. We do not find evidence of spillover effects on non-cognitive skills. Perhaps our most novel insight is the underlying mechanisms at work: the spillover effect on cognitive scores is very localized and seems to operate through the child's social network, mostly between treated kids. We do not find evidence that parents' or children's social networks are effective for non-cognitive skills. Overall, our results reveal the importance of public programs and neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age, highlighting that human capital accumulation is fundamentally a social activity.

Uri Gneezy, John A List, George Wu

Cited by*: 52 Downloads*: 40

Expected utility theory, prospect theory, and most other models of risky choice are based on the fundamental premise that individuals choose among risky prospects by balancing the value of the possible consequences. These models, therefore, require that the value of a risky prospect lie between the value of that prospect's highest and lowest outcome. Although this requirement seems essential for any theory of risky decision-making, we document a violation of this condition in which individuals value a risky prospect less than its worst possible realization. This demonstration, which we term the uncertainty effect, draws from more than 1000 experimental participants, and includes hypothetical and real pricing and choice tasks, as well as field experiments in real markets with financial incentives. Our results suggest that there are choice situations in which decision-makers discount lotteries for uncertainty in a manner that cannot be accommodated by standard models of risky choice.

John A List, Warren McHone , Daniel L Millimet

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 4

The Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments have been lauded as the primary stimulant to the impressive improvement in local air quality in the US since 1970. A key component of these regulations is the New Source Review (NSR) requirement, which includes the contentious stipulation that when an existing plant seeks to modify its operations, the entire plant must comply with current standards for new sources. This requirement was included to improve air quality in dirty areas, and prevent a deterioration of air quality in clean areas. Yet, whether NSR provides the proper plant-level incentives is unclear: there are strong disincentives to undertake major plant modifications to avoid NSR. In our examination of more than 2500 and 2200 plant-level modification decisions and closures, respectively, we find empirical evidence suggesting that NSR retards modification rates, while doing little to hasten the closure of existing dirty plants.

Ariel Goldszmidt, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Ian Muir, Jenny Wang

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

The value of time determines relative prices of goods and services, investments, productivity, economic growth, and measures of income inequality. Economists in the 1960s began to focus on the value of non-work time, pioneering a deep literature exploring the optimal allocation and value of time. By leveraging key features of these classic time allocation theories, we use a novel approach to estimate the value of time (VOT) via two large-scale natural field experiments with the ridesharing company Lyft. We use random variation in both wait times and prices to estimate a consumer's VOT with a data set of more than 14 million observations across consumers in US cities. We find that the VOT is roughly $19 per hour (or 75% (100%) of the after-tax mean (median) wage rate) and varies predictably with choice circumstances correlated with the opportunity cost of wait time. Our VOT estimate is larger than what is currently used by the US Government, suggesting that society is under-valuing time improvements and subsequently under-investing public resources in time-saving infrastructure projects and technologies.