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John A List

Cited by*: 4 Downloads*: 46

No abstract available

John A List, Imran Rasul

Cited by*: 3 Downloads*: 46

We overview the use of field experiments in labor economics. We showcase studies that highlight the central advantages of this methodology, which include: (i) using economic theory to design the null and alternative hypotheses; (ii) engineering exogenous variation in real world economic environments to establish causal relations and learning about the underlying mechanisms; and (iii) engaging in primary data collection and often working closely with practitioners. To highlight the potential for field experiments to inform issues in labor economics, we organize our discussion around the individual life cycle. We therefore consider field experiments related to the accumulation of human capital, the demand and supply of labor, behavior within firms, and close with a brief discussion of the nascent literature of field experiments related to household decision-making.

John A List, Michael K Price

Cited by*: 14 Downloads*: 45

The economics literature suggests that enhanced social connection can increase trust amongst agents, which can ultimately lead to more efficient economic outcomes, including increased provision of public goods. This study provides a test of whether social connectedness (proxied via agent similarities in race and gender) influences giving to a charitable fundraiser. Using data gathered from more than 2000 households approached in an actual door-to-door fundraising drive, we find limited evidence of the importance of such social connections. A robust result in the data, however, is that our minority solicitors, whether approaching a majority or minority household, are considerably less likely to obtain a contribution, and conditional on securing a contribution, gift size is lower than their majority counterparts receive.

Alan S Gerber, Donald P Green

Cited by*: 15 Downloads*: 45

We report the results of a randomized field experiment involving approximately 30,000 registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut. Nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages were conveyed through personal canvassing, direct mail, and telephone calls shortly before the November 1998 election. A variety of substantive messages were used. Voter turnout was increased substantially by personal canvassing, slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls. These findings support our hypothesis that the long-term retrenchment in voter turnout is partly attributable to the decline in face-to-face political mobilization.

Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, Gilbert Roberts

Cited by*: 52 Downloads*: 45

We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour.

Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Esther Duflo

Cited by*: 23 Downloads*: 44

There is surprisingly little information about the delivery of health care in rural India, and about the relationship, if any, between health care and health status. Some, such as the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization (2001), have argued that better health care is the key to improving health as well as economic growth in poor countries, but there is little systematic evidence that gives us a sense of how easy it is to impact the quality of health care delivery in developing countries and through these improvements to impact the health of the population. This paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of Rajasthan in India intended to shed some light on this issue, where we use a set of interlocking surveys to collect data on health and economic status, as well as the public and private provision of health care.

Alexander W Cappelen, John A List, Anya Samek, Bertil Tungodden

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 44

We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program with incentives, or to a control group. We returned to the same children when they reach 7-8 years old a conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit there social preferences. We find that early childhood education has a strong causal impact on social preferences several years after the intervention: attending preschool makes children more egalitarian in their fairness view and the parenting program enhances the importance children place on efficiency relative to fairness. Our findings highlight the importance of taking a broad perspective when designing and evaluating early childhood education programs, and provide evidence how differences in institutional exposure may contribute to explaining heterogeneity in social preferences in society.

Avner Ben-Ner, John A List, Louis Putterman, Anya Samek

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 43

An active area of research within the social sciences concerns the underlying motivation for sharing scarce resources and engaging in other pro-social actions. We develop a theoretical framework that sheds light on the developmental origins of social preferences by providing mechanisms through which parents transmit preferences for generosity to their children. Then, we conduct a field experiment with nearly 150 3-5 year old children and their parents, measuring (1) whether child and parent generosity is correlated, (2) whether children are influenced by their parents when making sharing decisions and (3) whether parents model generosity to children. We observe no correlation of independently measured parent and child sharing decisions at this young age. Yet, we find that apart from those choosing an equal allocation of resources between themselves and another child, children adjust their behaviors to narrow the gap with their parent's or other adult's choice. We find that fathers, and parents of initially generous children, increase their sharing when informed that their child will be shown their choice.

Doris Weichselbaumer

Cited by*: 43 Downloads*: 43

Little research has been done to examine discrimination against gays and lesbians in the labor market. Wage regressions have documented lower incomes for gays but repeatedly showed higher incomes for lesbians. The results concerning lesbian women are striking but can be reconciled with the existence of labor market discrimination, however. Problems like sample selection and unobserved heterogeneity-in particular, lesbians' violation of stereotypical female gender roles- might be responsible for their higher earnings. To investigate whether discrimination against lesbians actually does exist, a labor market experiment is conducted. Job applications of candidates, who are equivalent in their human capital but differ in their sexual orientation, are sent out in response to job advertisements. Furthermore, to test whether increased masculinity affects labor market outcomes, the applicants differ in their perceived gender identity. While results show a strong negative effect for lesbian orientation, gender identity does not have a significant overall impact on hiring chances.

Sarah Lichtenstein, Paul Slovic

Cited by*: 37 Downloads*: 43

The present report describes an expanded replication of the previous experiments in a nonlaboratory real-play setting unique to the experimental literature on decision processes - a casino in downtown Las Vegas.

Maria P Espinosa, Javier Gardeazabal

Cited by*: 2 Downloads*: 43

A disadvantage of multiple-choice tests is that students have incentives to guess. To discourage guessing, it is common to use scoring rules that either penalize wrong answers or reward omissions. These scoring rules are considered equivalent in psychometrics, although experimental evidence has not always been consistent with this claim. We model students' decisions and show, first, that equivalence holds only under risk neutrality and, second, that the two rules can be modified so that they become equivalent even under risk aversion. This paper presents the results of a filed experiment in which we analyze the decisions of subjects taking multiple-choice exams. The evidence suggests that differences between scoring rules are due to risk aversion as theory predicts. We also find that the number of omitted items depends on the scoring rule, knowledge, gender, and other covariates.

Greer K Gosnell, John A List, Robert D Metcalfe

Cited by*: 8 Downloads*: 42

Understanding motivations in the workplace remains of utmost import as economies around the world rely on increases in labor productivity to foster sustainable economic growth. This study makes use of a unique opportunity to "look under the hood" of an organization that critically relies on worker effort and performance. By partnering with Virgin Atlantic Airways on a field experiment that includes over 40,000 unique flights covering an eight-month period, we explore how information and incentives affect captains' performance. Making use of more than 110,000 captain-level observations, we find that our set of treatments-which include performance information, personal targets, and prosocial incentives-induces captains to improve efficiency in all three key flight areas: pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight. We estimate that our treatments saved between 266,000-704,000 kg of fuel for the airline over the eight-month experimental period. These savings led to between 838,000-2.22 million kg of CO2 abated at a marginal abatement cost of negative $250 per ton of CO2 (i.e. a $250 savings per ton abated) over the eight-month experimental period. Methodologically, our approach highlights the potential usefulness of moving beyond an experimental design that focuses on short-run substitution effects, and it also suggests a new way to combat firm-level externalities: target workers rather than the firm as a whole.

David H Herberich, John A List

Cited by*: 9 Downloads*: 42

The article reports on a study that provides understanding of how risk preferences and other factors influence a farmer's decision to participate in a carbon offset market. It states incorporating background risk in a laboratory setting and drawing subjects from both a standard student population and a nonstandard farmer population helped to understand the decision making process. The study suggests that farmers are slightly more risk averse than students.

Peter A Riach, Judith Rich

Cited by*: 15 Downloads*: 42

Racial discrimination in selection for job interview was measured directly by the experimental technique of "corresponding testing." Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were sent in response to advertised vacancies in Victoria--a state of Australia. One letter was from an applicant with an Anglo-Celtic name and the other was from an applicant with a Greek or Vietnamese name. Statistically significant discrimination was found against both Vietnamese-named and Greek-named applicants. There was no relationship between the incidence of discrimination and the competitive structure of the employer's product market.

John A List, Charles Bailey, Patricia Euzent , Thomas Martin

Cited by*: 10 Downloads*: 42

This article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior. Three main types of unethical behavior are examined: (1) falsification of research; (2) expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co-author on a research paper; and(3) exchange of grades for gifts, money, or sex. Using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct, particularly in the second category.

Elizabeth Lyons

Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 42

Remote and short-term work arrangements are increasingly common despite the limited incentives they provide for acquiring firm-specific knowledge. This paper examines the importance and cost-effectiveness of firm-specific training for remote contract workers using evidence from a field experiment conducted in an East African insurance firm that offers two-month employment contracts for its salespeople. Findings show that firm-specific training significantly increases firm revenue, but that this effect is concentrated among higher ability workers. Training has no impact on worker retention, and offering workers financial or competitive input-based incentives has no impact on these findings, or on observed worker investment in firm-specific training. These results demonstrate that high ability temporary workers may be willing to invest in firm-specific human capital without additional incentives, and that firm performance is significantly improved as a result. Implications for temporary work contracts are discussed.

Nava Ashaf, Xavier Gine, Dean S Karlan

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 41

This paper evaluates a program in Kenya that encourages the production of export oriented crops by providing smallholder farmers with credit linked to agricultural extension and marketing services. We use an experimental design in which farmer selfhelp groups are randomly assigned to either a control group, a group receiving all DrumNet services, or a group receiving all services except credit. Among the services offered by DrumNet, credit is the most important. Since the production of export crops requires a significant investment in capital and inputs, without credit farmers are less likely to plant the mentioned crops. Overall, the results show that DrumNet is an effective model for encouraging the production of export oriented crops.

John A List

Cited by*: 13 Downloads*: 41

This review steps back from the burgeoning economics literature on measuring social preferences and considers more carefully the empirical evidence from the lab and the field. I place the claims from the ardent supporters of the literature into three bins: one for claims that are supported by the data upon closer scrutiny, one for claims that are not supported by the data upon closer scrutiny, and one for claims that may or may not be true. The third set of claims highlights important theoretical and empirical investigations that need to be done to further our understanding of the nature and import of social preferences.

Uri Gneezy, Kenneth Leonard, John A List

Cited by*: 243 Downloads*: 41

This study uses a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed amongst the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men. We view these results as potentially providing insights into the underpinnings of the factors hypothesized to be determinants of the observed gender differences in selecting into competitive environments.

Luis Cabral, Lingfang Li

Cited by*: 1 Downloads*: 41

We run a series of controlled field experiments on eBay where buyers are re-warded for providing feedback. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis of buyer's rational economic behavior: the likelihood of feedback barely increases as we increase feedback rebate values; also, the speed of feedback, bid levels and the number of bids are all insensitive to rebate values. By contrast, we find evidence consistent with reciprocal buyer behavior. Lower trans-action quality leads to a higher probability of negative feedback as well as a speeding up of such negative feedback. However, when transaction quality is low (as measured by slow shipping), offering a rebate significantly decreases the likelihood of negative feedback. All in all, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that buyers reciprocate the seller's "good deeds" (feedback rebate, high transaction quality) with more frequent and more favorable feedback. As a result, sellers can "buy" feedback, but such feedback is likely to be biased.