Papers - Natural

Tim Jeppesen, John A List, Daan van Soest

Cited by*: 5 Downloads*: 6

Empirical tests of the relationship between international competitiveness and the severity of environmental regulations are hampered by the lack of pollution abatement cost data for non-U.S. countries. The theory of the firm suggests that environmental stringency can be measured by the difference between a polluting input's shadow price and its market price. We make a first attempt at quantifying such a measure for two industries located in nine European OECD countries. Overall, we provide (i) a new approach to measure cross-country regulatory differences in that we use a theoretically attractive measure of industry-specific private compliance cost, and (ii) empirical estimates that are an attractive tool for researchers and policymakers who are interested in examining how economic activity is influenced by compliance costs.

Eliana Carranza, Robyn Meeks

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 57

Overloaded electrical systems are a major source of unreliable power (outages) in developing countries. Using a randomized saturation design, we estimate the impact of energy efficient lightbulbs on household electricity consumption and local electricity reliability. Receiving compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) significantly reduced household electricity consumption. Estimates not controlling for spillovers in take-up underestimate the impacts of the CFLs, as control households near the treated are likely to take-up CFLs themselves. Greater saturation of CFLs within a transformer leads to aggregate reliability impacts of two fewer days per month without electricity due to unplanned outages relative to pure controls. Increased electricity reliability permits households to consume more electricity services, suggesting that CFL treatment results in technological externalities. The spillovers in take-up and technological externalities that we document may provide an additional explanation for the gap between empirical and engineering estimates of the impacts of energy efficient technologies.

Maurizio Bovi

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 29

To learn the people's expectations formation process, we examine shocks and survey expectations on individual and aggregate income. Data show that shocks have permanent effects on both expectations, which do not diverge systematically because agents revise forecasts. Actually, only expectations on GDP dynamics are revised. These latter overreact to shocks and are more volatile than expectations on personal stances. Disagreement is persistently high. Astonishingly, there is even less consensus when expectations deal with the same fundamental. Lastly, we elaborate a test on whether - and find evidence that - cross sectional disagreement and time series volatility in expectations are equal.

Tanjim Hossain, John Morgan

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 7

We use field and natural experiments in online auctions to study the revenue effect of varying the level and disclosure of shipping charges. Our main findings are (1) disclosure affects revenues-for low shipping charges, a seller is better off disclosing; and (2) increasing shipping charges boosts revenues when these charges are hidden. These results are not explained by changes in the number of bidders.

Dean S Karlan, John A List, Eldar Shafir

Cited by*: 31 Downloads*: 29

To further our understanding of the economics of charity, we conducted a natural field experiment. Making use of two direct mail solicitations sent to nearly 20,000 prior donors to a charity, we tested the effectiveness of $1:$1 and $1:$3 matching grants on charitable giving. We find only weak evidence that either of the matches work; in fact, for the full sample, the match only increased giving after the match deadline expired. Yet, the aggregation masks important heterogeneities: those donors who are actively supporting the organization tend to be positively influenced whereas lapsed givers are either not affected or adversely affected. Furthermore, some presentations of the match can do harm, e.g., when an example amount given is high ($75) and the match ratio is below $1:$1. Overall, the results help clarify what might cause people to give and provide further evidence that larger match ratios are not necessarily superior to smaller match ratios.

Jeffrey C Ely, Tanjim Hossain

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 7

We conducted a field experiment to test the benefit from late bidding (sniping) in online auction markets. We compared sniping to early bidding (squatting) in auctions for newly-released DVDs on eBay. Sniping led to a statistically significant increase in our average surplus. However, this improvement was small. The two bidding strategies resulted in a variety of other qualitative differences in the outcomes of auctions. We show that a model of multiple concurrent auctions, in which our opponents are naive or incremental bidders as identified in the lab, explain the results well. Our findings illustrate how the overall impact of naivete, and the benefit from sniping observed in the lab, may be substantially attenuated in real-world market settings.

Orana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, Imran Rasul

Cited by*: 236 Downloads*: 114

We present evidence on whether workers have social preferences by comparing workers' productivity under relative incentives, where individual effort imposes a negative externality on others, to their productivity under piece rates, where it does not. We find that the productivity of the average worker is at least 50 percent higher under piece rates than under relative incentives. We show that this is due to workers partially internalizing the negative externality their effort imposes on others under relative incentives, especially when working alongside their friends. Under piece rates, the relationship among workers does not affect productivity. Further analysis reveals that workers internalize the externality only when they can monitor others and be monitored. This rules out pure altruism as the underlying motive of workers' behavior.

John A. List, Haruka Uchida

Cited by*: Downloads*:

Excellence gaps - disparities in advanced academic achievement - between racial groups appear by age 8 or 9 and persist throughout secondary school in the United States. About one-third of the gap is due to socio-economic status and one-tenth to school factors, indicating that policies should address both educational and local environments.

Aaron Bodoh-Creed, Brent R Hickman, John A List, Ian Muir, Gregory Sun

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

In this paper, we provide a suite of tools for empirical market design, including optimal nonlinear pricing in intensive-margin consumer demand, as well as a broad class of related adverse selection models. Despite significant data limitations, we are able to derive informative bounds on demand under counterfactual price changes. These bounds arise because empirically plausible DGPs must respect the Law of Demand and the observed shift(s) in aggregate demand resulting from a known exogenous price change(s). These bounds facilitate robust policy prescriptions using rich, internal data sources similar to those available in many real-world applications. Our partial identification approach enables viable nonlinear pricing design while achieving robustness against worst-case deviations from baseline model assumptions. As a side benefit, our identification results also provide useful, novel insights into optimal experimental design for pricing RCTs.

Philip Oreopoulos, Uros Petronijevic

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 25

Recent studies show that programs offering structured, one-on-one coaching and tutoring tend to have large effects on the academic outcomes of both high school and college students. These programs are often costly to implement and difficult to scale, however, calling into question whether making them available to large student populations is feasible. In contrast, interventions that rely on technology to maintain low-touch contact with students can be implemented at large scale and minimal cost but with the risk of not being as effective as one-on-one, in-person assistance. In this paper, we test whether the effects of coaching programs can be replicated at scale by using technology to reach a larger population of students. We work with a sample of over four thousand undergraduate students from a large Canadian university, randomly assigning students into one of the following three interventions: (i) a one-time online exercise designed to affirm students' values and goals; (ii) a text messaging campaign that provides students with academic advice, information, and motivation; and (iii) a personal coaching service, in which students are matched with upper-year undergraduate coaches. We find large positive effects from the coaching program, as coached students realize a 0.3 standard deviation increase in average grades and a 0.35 standard deviation increase in GPA. In contrast, we find no effects from either the online exercise or the text messaging campaign on any academic outcome, both in the general student population and across several student subgroups. A comparison of the key features of the text messaging campaign and the coaching service suggests that proactively and regularly initiating conversations with students and working to establish trust are important design features to incorporate in future interventions that use technology to reach large populations of students.

John A List

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

No abstract available

Joshua D Clinton, John S Lapinski

Cited by*: 6 Downloads*: 6

Scholars disagree whether negative advertising demobilizes or stimulates the electorate. We use an experiment with over 10,200 eligible voters to evaluate the two leading hypotheses of negative political advertising. We extend the analysis to examine whether advertising differentially impacts the turnout of voter subpopulations depending on the advertisement's message. In the short term, we find no evidence that exposure to negative advertisements decreases turnout and little that suggests it increases turnout. Any effect appears to depend upon the message of the advertisement and the characteristics of the viewer. In the long term, we find little evidence that the information contained in the treatment groups' advertisements is sufficient to systematically alter turnout.

Marsha Blumenthal, Charles Christian, Joel Slemrod

Cited by*: 148 Downloads*: 124

In 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected Minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be 'closely examined'. Compared to a control group that did not receive this letter, low and middle-income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year, which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncompliance. The effect was much stronger for those with more opportunity to evade; in fact, the difference in differences is not statistically significant for those who do not have self-employment or farm income, and do not pay estimated tax. Surprisingly, however, the reported tax liability of the high income treatment group fell sharply relative to the control group.

Paul Glewwe, Nauman Ilias, Michael Kremer

Cited by*: 21 Downloads*: 25

Advocates of teacher incentive programs argue that they can strengthen weak incentives, while opponents argue they lead to teaching to the test.' We find evidence that existing teacher incentives in Kenya are indeed weak, with teachers absent 20% of the time. We then report on a randomized evaluation of a program that provided primary school teachers in rural Kenya with incentives based on students' test scores. Students in program schools had higher test scores, significantly so on at least some exams, during the time the program was in place. An examination of the channels through which this effect took place, however, provides little evidence of more teacher effort aimed at increasing long-run learning. Teacher attendance did not improve, homework assignment did not increase, and pedagogy did not change. There is, however, evidence that teachers increased effort to raise short-run test scores by conducting more test preparation sessions. While students in treatment schools scored higher than their counterparts in comparison schools during the life of the program, they did not retain these gains after the end of the program, consistent with the hypothesis that teachers focused on manipulating short-run scores. In order to discourage dropouts, students who did not test were assigned low scores. Program schools had the same dropout rate as comparison schools, but a higher percentage of students in program schools took the test.

Dean S Karlan, Martin Valdivia

Cited by*: 15 Downloads*: 27

Most academic and development policy discussions about microentrepreneurs focus on credit constraints and assume that subject to those constraints, the entrepreneurs manage their business optimally. Yet the self-employed poor rarely have any formal training in business skills. A growing number of microfinance organizations are attempting to build the human capital of microentrepreneurs in order to improve the livelihood of their clients and help further their mission of poverty alleviation. Using a randomized control trial, we measure the marginal impact of adding business training to a Peruvian group lending program for female microentrepreneurs. Treatment groups received thirty- to sixty-minute entrepreneurship training sessions during their normal weekly or monthly banking meeting over a period of one to two years. Control groups remained as they were before, meeting at the same frequency but solely for making loan and savings payments. We find little or no evidence of changes in key outcomes such as business revenue, profits, or employment. We nevertheless observed business knowledge improvements and increased client retention rates for the microfinance institution.

Maria De Paola, Francesca Gioia, Vincenzo Scoppa

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

We ran a field experiment to investigate whether individual performance in teams depends on the gender of the leader. About 430 students from an Italian University took an intermediate exam that was partly evaluated on the basis of teamwork. Students were randomly matched in teams of three and in each team we randomly chose a leader with the task of coordinating the work of the team. We find a positive and significant effect of female leadership on team performance. This effect is driven by the higher performance of team members in female led teams rather than due to an improvement in the leader's performance. We also find that, in spite of the higher performance of female led teams, male members tend to evaluate female leaders as less effective, whereas female members are more sympathetic towards them.

Stefano DellaVigna, John A List, Ulrike Malmendier

Cited by*: 257 Downloads*: 65

Every year, 90 percent of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, e.g., due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, e.g., due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raising drive in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their door-knobs; thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 10 to 25 percent and, if the flyer allows checking a `Do Not Disturb' box, reduces giving by 30 percent. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.5 for an in-state charity and $1.4 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower utility of the potential donors.

Alec Brandon, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Michael K Price, Florian Rundhammer

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This study considers the response of household electricity consumption to social nudges during peak load events. Our investigation considers two social nudges. The first targets conservation during peak load events, while the second promotes aggregate conservation. Using data from a natural field experiment with 42,100 households, we find that both social nudges reduce peak load electricity consumption by 2 to 4% when implemented in isolation and by nearly 7% when implemented in combination. These findings suggest an important role for social nudges in the regulation of electricity markets and a limited role for crowd out effects.

Alec Brandon, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe, Michael K Price, Florian Rundhammer

Cited by*: None Downloads*: None

This study considers the response of household electricity consumption to social nudges during peak load events. Our investigation considers two social nudges. The first targets conservation during peak load events, while the second promotes aggregate conservation. Using data from a natural field experiment with 42,100 households, we find that both social nudges reduce peak load electricity consumption by 2 to 4% when implemented in isolation and by nearly 7% when implemented in combination. These findings suggest an important role for social nudges in the regulation of electricity markets and a limited role for crowd out effects.

Peter A Riach, Judith Rich

Cited by*: 15 Downloads*: 42

Racial discrimination in selection for job interview was measured directly by the experimental technique of "corresponding testing." Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were sent in response to advertised vacancies in Victoria--a state of Australia. One letter was from an applicant with an Anglo-Celtic name and the other was from an applicant with a Greek or Vietnamese name. Statistically significant discrimination was found against both Vietnamese-named and Greek-named applicants. There was no relationship between the incidence of discrimination and the competitive structure of the employer's product market.