A common argument for the lack of economic reform in developing countries is popular opposition. If current economic policies are dysfunctional, could information about alternatives sway the voters? We examine if a simple argument emphasizing the need to increase electricity prices for improved...

For low-income families in the United States disability assistance has emerged as a critical income support program in the post-welfare reform era. This article explores how this monetization of illness—tying receipt of government assistance to a physical or mental condition—influences how...

Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest...

This paper uses both subjective well-being and survey experimental data to analyze how people's positional concerns regarding income and goods vary with age. The subjective well-being approach is mainly based on German panel data for the period 1984-2009 (German Socio-Economic Panel), while the...

Loss aversion is one of the most robust findings to have emerged from behavioral economics. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been devoted to nominal loss aversion, the interaction of loss aversion and money illusion. People tend to think of transactions in terms of their nominal...

We investigate attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in Northern Ethiopia using a survey experiment. On average, we find very low positional concerns both for income per se and for income from aid projects. The results support the claim that positional concerns are positively...

Questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries, four low-income countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Kenya and Laos, 1924 respondents) and four high-income countries (Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, 1959...

We report results from a survey experiment aimed at testing whether providing information on the national public expenditure to the taxpayers and whether involving them in the process of allocating tax revenues over public goods influence the level of the adequate tax rate - the fraction of...

We provide three related approaches to better understand the connections between the literatures on the value of privacy, and economic decision-making. In particular, we consider economic scenarios where individuals lack important information about facets of a privacy choice and where the...

This paper investigates whether the individual misperception of income distributions helps explain why, opposite to Meltzer and Richard (1981), higher initial inequality levels do not correlate positively with redistribution. I conduct a representative survey experiment in Brazil, France,...