Many studies have sought to estimate the effects of participating in sports on ex-athletes’ adult lives. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, it adopts an instrumental-variables method pioneered by Betsey Stevenson (2010) in which variation in rates of boys’ athletic participation across states before the passage of Title IX is used to instrument for changes in girls’ athletic participation following its passage, thereby avoiding selection bias and allowing for causal estimates. Second, it looks at the effect of participating in sports not on economic, but on social outcomes. In particular, we find that a ten percentage-point increase in state-level female sports participation generates a five to six percentage-point rise in the rate of female secularism, a five percentage-point increase in the proportion of women who are mothers, and a six percentage-point rise in the proportion of mothers who, at the time that they are interviewed, are single mothers. While our results appear to paint a picture of independence from potentially patriarchal institutions (church and marriage), further research is necessary to understand whether our results can be attributed to a single story such as this one or whether they are the products of multiple causal mechanisms.
We investigate voluntary contribution to public goods in culturally heterogeneous groups with a laboratory experiment conducted among 432 Hindu and Muslim subjects in India. With our specification of 'Leading by example' we test for an interaction effect between leadership and religious heterogeneity in a high stake environment. While cultural diversity does not affect contributions in the standard linear Public Goods Game, it reduces cooperation in the presence of a leader. Furthermore, we show that preferences for conditional cooperation are only prevalent in pure groups. In mixed groups, poor leadership and uncertainty about followers' reciprocity hinders the functionality of leadership as an institutional device to resolve social dilemmas.
This article is interested in how efficiently individuals can use available information, and if this will translate into efficient outcomes at the market level. Our use of available information in markets is further specified by evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology, which extend core theory and evidence in behavioral finance throughout the reviewed literature. The survey of the social, biological and physical literature is integrative, and demonstrates how evolved design at the individual level can interact with a market environment that evolves as a complex adaptive system. In general, the analysis also highlights the central importance of complex systems in the study of rational and efficient markets. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (JOBEE) celebrates its 50th year in 2021. To commemorate its 50th anniversary, this study presents a retrospect on the journal's journey since it began publishing in 1972. We find that the journal has since grown in terms of both the number of annual articles and citations. The contribution base of the journal is primarily from the United States and Europe. Collaboration and the use of experimental research have become more prevalent in the journal over the years. Regression analysis shows that the drivers for citations include article age, research type, article length, belonging to a special issue, article order in the issue, number of authors, involvement of European authors as lead authors, number of references, and number of keywords. Variables that are analyzed but do not affect citations are whether the article is a lead article, whether the lead author is from the US, the novelty of the title, title length, and abstract length.
This paper provides the first evidence regarding the impact of life satisfaction on the individual intention to migrate. The impact of individual characteristics and country macroeconomic variables on the decision to migrate is analyzed in one framework. Differently from other studies, we allow for life satisfaction to serve as a mediator between macroeconomic variables and the intention to migrate. Using the Euro-barometer Survey for 27 Central Eastern (CEE) and Western European (non-CEE) countries, we test the predictions of our theoretical model and find that dissatisfied with life, people have a higher intention to migrate. The macroeconomic conditions have an effect on the intention to migrate indirectly through life satisfaction. At all levels of life satisfaction, unemployed, middle-aged individuals with a low or average income from urban areas at all levels of education are found to have higher intentions to migrate from CEE countries than from non-CEE countries.
Paper presents results of an evaluation of a tax-time savings program. $aveNYC offers incentivized savings accounts to taxpayers filing their taxes at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites in New York City. Participants who direct-deposited at least $200 of their refund into the account and maintained the balance for a year received 50 cents per dollar saved. A comparison group was drawn from NYC VITA sites where the program was not offered. Propensity score weighting was used to balance the two groups. Study participants (N = 353) were surveyed via telephone halfway through the program, and again 8 months after the program ended. 70 percent of $aveNYC participants surveyed received the match. The majority of those who received the match continued to save some portion of the money. At the second survey, there was no significant difference between groups in savings amount: this finding may be due to measurement limitations. $aveNYC participants were less likely than comparison group members to have skipped paying bills or taken out a loan during the study period, and were more likely to have withdrawn money from savings. Findings suggest that tax-time savings programs can result in sustained emergency savings and prevent reliance on borrowing and unpaid bills. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate elicitation of individual risk attitudes in general socio-economic surveys. A multi-item question on the willingness to take risk, a very short form of the DOSPERT scale (Weber et al., 2002) and a series of lottery tasks are compared with respect to the quality of the answers and the predictive validity of the derived risk measures. The quality of the collected data appears to be high. All the measures are informative about individual's attitudes while item nonresponse is mostly unproblematic. The measures however differ in their predictive power, with the lottery-based measures exhibiting only weak predictive validity. When the scope of the assessment is to predict behaviour, domain specific risk measures seem to be more appropriate. Embedding a short DOSPERT scale in general surveys appears to be very promising for empirical applications in social sciences that use survey-based risk measures. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This paper examines whether intergenerational transmission of happiness exists in China between preadolescents and their parents, and what factors are correlated with subjective well-being among them. We find that parents' and their children's levels of subjective well-being are indeed significantly correlated. yet the factors that affect their well-being differ. Higher income, being a female, higher education, good health, and not being divorced result in higher well-being among the parents. Preadolescents' well-being is instead determined by different kinds of interactions with peers and parents, where being bullied or not is one of the most important factors. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In most Western economies, the flourishing of the Welfare State has coincided with a decline of the role of the family: divorce has been introduced, and the number of marriages has decreased. We suggest that a taboo against divorce was part of the informal safety net in a period when social protection was provided by the family. Once the State started offering suitable alternatives, the taboo was no longer expedient, and was dropped. For the same reasons, marriage has become less popular. We further notice that divorce is an extremely costly process, and once allowed it may act as an independent reason for the reduction of the number of marriages. This latter result is especially evident under the assumption that agents subjectively evaluate the probability of facing a divorce using an availability heuristic.
The issue of low-wage competition in services trade involving posted workers is controversial in the EU. Using Swedish survey data, people’s attitudes are found to be more negative to such trade than to goods trade. The differences depend on both a preference for favouring social groups to which individuals belong (here the domestic population) and altruistic justice concerns for foreign workers. In small-group experiments we find a tendency for people to adjust their evaluations of various aspects of trade to their general attitude. This tendency is stronger for those opposed to than those in favour of low-wage trade competition. This may indicate that the former group forms its attitudes in a less rational way than the latter group.
Recent research distinguishes an individual's decision utility, inferred from her observed choices, from her experienced utility, which more closely matches the notion of happiness. Using various estimation techniques, we test whether post-choice satisfaction (experienced utility), like decision utility in an experimental data set, is S-shaped with loss aversion around a given reference point. We also present a model which estimates the satisfaction function and reference point simultaneously. When pooling the data across individuals, we find an S-shaped satisfaction function in which the reference point depends on past payments, social comparisons, and subjective expectations. There is mixed evidence of loss aversion. At the individual level, there is substantial variation in satisfaction function shapes, although the S-shape is common. Though the two notions of utility are distinct, our findings imply that the two are related at a fundamental level. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
We test whether induced mood states have an effect on elicited risk and time preferences in a conventional laboratory experiment. We jointly estimate risk and time preferences and use a mixture specification that allows choices to be consistent with Expected Utility theory or with probability weighting. Time preferences between subjects in the control, positive mood, and negative mood treatments are not statistically significantly different. However, for choices consistent with Expected Utility Theory, we find that subjects induced into a negative mood exhibit higher risk aversion than those in either the control treatment or the positive mood treatment. For choices that are consistent with probability weighting, we find that positive mood increases risk aversion. Results also suggest that risk preferences are affected by whether a cognitively demanding task precedes a risk preference elicitation task or whether subjects were placed in a gender-specific session rather than a mixed-gender session.
This article contributes to the research on trust and reputation formation in anonymous online markets. I first give a formal account of the reputation mechanism in anonymous online markets and derive testable hypotheses. Based on the analysis of a large set of process data (N ≈ 176,000), I corroborate a statistically and economically significant seller reputation effect on the probability of sale and the selling price both in auctions and fixed price offers. Moreover, my analysis shows that sellers making fixed price offers invest in a good reputation to a similar extent as buyers pay for it in auctions. Finally, I obtain repeated observations on a considerable subset of the buyer population by including highest non-winning bids in the analysis and show that buyers trade off sellers’ reputations and prices within the set of offered items they choose to bid on. My findings provide further evidence that reputation systems solve trust problems and reduce transaction costs in anonymous online markets by providing incentives for traders’ cooperative behavior.
All individuals belong to a social network with certain quality level. This paper analyzes the role of the quality of the social network in the educational decision making process. We propose a measure for quality of network based on the schooling level and the labor position of the members of the net. Our analysis compares individuals who are similar in at least two characteristics: socioeconomic level and intellectual ability. Although they belong to the same type of community (poor), they differ in the composition of their social network. The higher the quality of the network, the higher the probability of investing in education. Hence, socially disadvantaged and equally intelligent individuals may end up acquiring different schooling levels.
Why do not social norms simply collapse from the violation? This paper analyzes two distinct mechanisms on norm compliance: punishment and reputation. The model considers two groups of agents in a society with one norm. Agents in one group choose whether to comply with the norm, while agents in the other group potentially punish opponents who violate the norm. The paper investigates two scenarios to account for the long-run stability of the norm. In one scenario, the norm is enforced due to a higher level of punishment of the violation. In another scenario, everyone is motivated due to reputation formation, despite a lower level of punishment by others. The interaction of two mechanisms provides a convenient way to norm compliance. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In a cluster and in a network the figure of the entrepreneurs appear as an apparatus of social relations and cooperation. We believe that entrepreneurial networks are key elements for a cultural quality system, but recent literature tends to not consider the social flow (internal) of spillovers produced by these (entrepreneurial) networks. The purpose of this paper is to stress the role of entrepreneurs through a conceptual map that relies upon strategic entrepreneurial networks. We suggest to fill a theoretical gap in entrepreneurial literature, and make the figure and role of entrepreneurial networking team emerge with a strategic role for creating opportunities and new social knowledge. From our interpretation appears what is still unexpressed or not well explicated in literature: the entrepreneurial team and its natural attitude in producing social knowledge.
We construct a rich dataset covering 47 developing countries over the years 1990-2007, combining several micro and macro level data sources to explore the link between political factors and body mass index (BMI). We implement a heteroskedastic generalized ordered logit model allowing for different covariate effects across the BMI distribution and accounting for the unequal BMI dispersion by geographical area. We find that systems with democratic qualities are more likely to reduce under-weight, but increase overweight/obesity, whereas effective political competition does entail double-benefits in the form of reducing both under-weight and obesity. Our results are robust to the introduction of country fixed effects. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The paper contributes to the interpretation of annual growth rates based on the effect of the basic growth factors (capital, labour, human capital) and the cultural background as part of the "remaining factors". It uses a series of variables to express these effects, which are analysed with a principal component analysis and a regression analysis, in the context of a Solow-Romer augmented growth framework. Cultural background variables are divided in two main groups: "Efficiency Orientation" and "Social Orientation" variables. We formulate the hypothesis that within the well-known growth framework "Efficiency Orientation" variables significantly affect economic growth, while "Social Orientation" influences are unpredicted in principle. The results confirm that cultural background positively affects annual growth rates. However, "Social Orientation" plays the main (positive) role. Furthermore, performing a sensitivity analysis on the cultural background, the conclusions confirm that cultural background has a strong interpretive role in annual growth rates. The,deterioration of the "Social Orientation" cultural background negatively affects annual GDP growth. The paper points the crucial explanatory power of the "Social Orientation" cultural background for annual growth rates. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
We model conflict between two agents in which each one has two possible strategies: cease-fire or rejection of the truce. We use the concept of pre-donations, namely, a redefinition of the game in which each agent commits to transfer a share of its output to the other agent (Sertel, 1991). Conditions are established under which a system of pre-donations may facilitate a truce. In particular, for conflicts involving high costs there is a distributive mechanism, acceptable for both parties, whereby cease-fire is the best strategy for both of them. However, in many cases the conditions are not right for such a scheme of pre-donations to be effective. Some limitations of the framework are analyzed and the model is extended to deal with certain shortcomings in the basic setup. To illustrate the relevance of the theoretical results, we briefly describe the circumstances that have characterized the negotiation processes between the Colombian government and various illegal groups in this long-lasting armed conflict. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This study explored a longitudinal data set of over 5000 adults’ determining factors that influence adults salary/wage earnings. In a large, nationally representative sample in the UK, the National Child Development Study, data were collected at birth, in childhood (age 11), and adulthood (age 50) to examine the effects of family social background, childhood ability tests scores, adult personality traits, educational and occupational attainment on current earnings. Results showed that for men, parental social status and trait Conscientiousness had modest but significant and direct influence in their earnings in adulthood; whereas for women the traits of intellect and emotional stability had modest but significant and direct influence in their financial well-being in adulthood. For both men and women, childhood intelligence had a significant and direct effect on adult earnings, and family background and childhood intelligence in part predicted adult earnings mediating through educational qualifications and occupational prestige. The strongest predictor of adult earnings was current occupational prestige. The gender wage differential and its implications are discussed.
