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Patrizia Lattarulo, Marco Mariani, Laura Razzolini

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This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy-Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points toward their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation.

Laura Forastiere, Patrizia Lattarulo, Marco Mariani, Fabrizia Mealli, Laura Razzolini

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This paper revisits results from a field experiment conducted in Florence, Italy to study the effects of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums and to identify best practices to transform this behavior into a long run cultural consumption. Students belonging to a first group of classes receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. Students in a second group of classes receive the flyer and a short presentation conducted by an art expert. Students in a third group of classes, in addition to the flyer and the presentation, receive also a nonfinancial reward in the form of extra-credit points towards their school grade. Taking a Principal Stratification approach, we explore the causal pathways that may lead students to increase their future museum attendance. Within the strata defined by compliance to the three forms of encouragement, we estimate associative and dissociative principal causal effects, that is, effects of the encouragement on the primary outcome, long run cultural consumption, that are associative or dissociative with respect to the effects of the encouragements on the Palazzo Vecchio visit. This analysis allows to interpret these effects as ascribable either to the encouragements, or to the museum visits, or to classroom spillovers. To face identification issues, estimation is performed with Bayesian inferential methods using hierarchical models to account for clustering. The main findings of the analysis are as follows: what seems to matter the most is the motivational incentive (i.e., the presentation), rather than the induced experience, i.e., the Palazzo Vecchio visit.

Andreas Loschel, Michael K Price, Laura Razzolini, Madeline Werthschulte

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This study explores whether negative income shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic affect the demand for environmental policy. By running a survey in Germany in May 2020, we show that there is a large and negative correlation between the COVID-19 income shocks and the willingness to support green policies. Importantly, this relation is separate from the effect of long-run income. Building on the first evidence, our study provides directions for future valuation studies. Specifically, our results provide a proof of concept that welfare analyses based on willingness-to-pay estimates to assess the benefits of an environmental good or the cost of an environmental damage may be downward biased if temporary changes in income are not considered.