Showing 1 - 10 of 225
I consider the effect of caring, empathy, altruism or positive reciprocity towards others - which I collectively call … the public good converges to the efficient level. An increase in caring, empathy, altruism or positive reciprocity, an … efficiently is attributable to lack of empathy/altruism/positive reciprocity as well as to the free rider problem …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013191062
Despite the low levels of taxation and public good provision in Africa, I provide evidence that a large proportion of Africans prefer lower taxation and fewer public goods. This cannot be explained by standard arguments about problems of accountability, governance or state capacity. Instead I...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013191019
We study the effects of an unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children. The program allocated $1,076 to randomly selected households in rural Kenya. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children from 1,687 households with survey questions and incentivized...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372476
Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm the "don't be a toad" norm, as it...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014635680
We report the results of an online experiment studying preferences for giving and preferences for group …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012660053
laboratory experiment to cleanly fix beliefs about the person's likelihood of being pivotal in reaching a donation threshold that …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014247963
We show that, in a general family of linearized structural macroeconomic models, knowledge of the empirically estimable causal effects of contemporaneous and news shocks to the prevailing policy rule is sufficient to construct counterfactuals under alternative policy rules. If the researcher is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013362012
Many community organizations provide services similar to government programs, but there is limited evidence how increased government aid affects the use and availability of charitable services. This study examines how greater access to federal nutrition assistance through schoolwide free meal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015361438
A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012496107
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012496155