Economics Of Discrimination

Governing the Commons

หนงสอ Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction เขยนโดย Colin F. Camerer มวตถประสงคเพอนำเสนอหลกฐานเชงประจกษจากผลการวจยจำนวนมากมายทยนยนอทธพลของปจจยทางจตวทยาทมผลตอการตดสนใจตามทฤษฎเกม หนงสอ เลมนไดนำเสนอแนวคดทฤษฎทเพมความสามารถในการอธบายพฤตกรรมการตดสนใจตามทฤษฎเกม (Game theory) ซง von Neumann; & Morgenstern ไดเสนอไวในป ค.ศ. 1944 โดยชใหเหนวา ปจจยทางจตวทยามอทธพลทำใหการตดสนใจทเกดขนจรงคลาดเคลอนจากการคาดการณของทฤษฎเกม

Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction

The role of board gender and foreign ownership in the CSR performance of Chinese listed firms

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day. By Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, 320 pp., ...

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day

Why are people who live in poverty disproportionately affected by mental illness? We review the interdisciplinary evidence of the bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and common mental illnesses-depression and anxiety-and the underlying mechanisms. Research shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income, and that psychological interventions generate economic gains. Similarly, negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and antipoverty programs such as cash transfers improve mental health. A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects.

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Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms.

I exploit a natural experiment in Indian schools to study how being integrated with poor students affects the social behaviors and academic outcomes of rich students. Using administrative data, lab and field experiments to measure outcomes, I find that having poor classmates makes rich students (i) more prosocial, generous, and egalitarian; and (ii) less likely to discriminate against poor students, and more willing to socialize with them. These effects are driven by personal interactions between rich and poor students. In contrast, I find mixed but overall modest impacts on rich students' academic achievement.

/pdf/familiarity-does-not-breed-contempt-generosity-4lrmvyaw8n.pdf

Familiarity Does Not Breed Contempt: Generosity, Discrimination, and Diversity in Delhi Schools

Why do people vote? We argue that signaling utility plays a significant role in explaining voting behavior: people vote because others might ask. We construct a model in which individuals may derive pride from signaling to others that they voted and, conversely, feel shame or guilt from admitting that they did not vote. We design a field experiment that is tightly linked to this model and allows us to estimate the key parameters of the theory. In three inter-related treatments, we study the cost voters and non-voters of the 2010 congressional election are willing to incur to sort into and out of situations in which they might be asked whether they voted. We find that signaling utility significantly affects the sorting of non-voters. For a broad range of plausible values of lying cost, we estimate a value of voting ‘just because others will ask’ of $10-$15. This value is sizeable enough to explain election turnout.

/pdf/voting-to-tell-others-20y351z4pn.pdf

Voting to Tell Others

Behavioral development economics applies theories and ideas from psychology and behavioral economics to the study of questions in development economics. We begin by examining a central puzzle in development economics: the existence of high rates of return without correspondingly rapid growth (the “Euler equation puzzle”). We discuss the extent to which present bias and loss aversion can help resolve this puzzle. We next consider various topics in development, including preventive health, savings, insurance, technology adoption, labor markets, and firms. We discuss particular behavioral theories that can help explain some key facts in each literature and describe the existing empirical evidence. Behavioral topics covered include non-standard preferences (present bias, loss aversion, and social preferences), nonstandard beliefs (naivete and non-Bayesian learning) and non-standard decision-making (limited attention and memory, mental accounting, and default effects). We argue that firms in developing countries are more likely to deviate from profit maximization and that studying “behavioral firms” in developing countries is a promising new agenda for research. We also discuss a recent literature arguing that variation in social preferences is an important driver of development, may have deep historical roots, yet may also be responsive to policies. Finally, we describe the emerging literature on the psychology of poverty, which argues that living in poverty itself may causally affect cognitive function, decision-making, and productivity.

Behavioral development economics

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

/pdf/the-importance-of-being-marginal-gender-differences-in-4xgoju6ufy.pdf

Gautam Rao

Papers

Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms.

Familiarity Does Not Breed Contempt: Generosity, Discrimination, and Diversity in Delhi Schools

Voting to Tell Others

Behavioral development economics

The Importance of Being Marginal: Gender Differences in Generosity