PUBLICATIONS
- The Causal Effect of Income Growth on Consumer Social Responsibility, with Björn Bartling and Roberto Weber, accepted, Economic Journal
- Public Discourse and Socially Responsible Market Behavior, with Björn Bartling, Roberto Weber and Lan Yao, 2024, American Economic Review, 114(10), 3041-3074.
- Redistribution and Beliefs about the Sources of Income Inequality, 2022, Experimental Economics, 25(3), 876-901.
- On the Scope of Externalities in Experimental Markets, with Björn Bartling and Roberto Weber, 2019, Experimental Economics, 22(3), pp. 610-624
- Dual Sourcing under Risky Public Procurement, 2016, Annals of Economics and Statistics, 121-122, pp. 25-44
- Government Opportunism in Public-Private Partnerships, 2015, Journal of Public Economic Theory, 17(1), pp. 111-135
- Les écarts de prix de l'eau en France entre le secteur privé et public, 2015, Revue Économique, 66(6), pp. 1045-1066
WORKING PAPERS & WORK IN PROGRESS
- Keep Calm and Carry On: The Short vs. Long Run Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on (Academic) Performance , with Lea Cassar and Mira Fischer, Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of the European Economic Association
Mindfulness-based meditation practices are becoming increasingly popular in Western societies, including in the business world and in education. While the scientific literature has largely documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation on mental health, little is still known about potential spillovers of these practices on other important life outcomes, such as performance. We address this question through a field experiment in an educational setting. We study the causal impact of mindfulness meditation on academic performance through a randomized evaluation of a well-known eight-week mindfulness meditation training delivered to university students on campus. As expected, the intervention improves students’ mental health and non-cognitive skills. However, it takes time before students’ performance can benefit from mindfulness meditation: we find that, if anything, the intervention marginally decreases average grades in the short run, i.e, during the exam period right after the end of the intervention, while it significantly increases academic performance by about 0.4 standard deviations in the long run (ca. 6 months after the end of intervention). We investigate the underlying mechanisms and discuss the implications of our results.
- On the relative deservingness of capital and labor, with Florian Schneider and Roberto Weber
The allocation of production rewards between capital and labor is a topic of long-standing interest to economists, with recent growing attention due to rising capital shares and inequality. We study, using pre-registered experiments with representative samples of the US and the Swiss populations, perceptions of fairness in the allocation of rewards to work and investment. Our design holds constant many factors that may influence individuals’ policy preferences over such allocations. In the experiment, two participants provide separate inputs to production, either in the form of monetary investment or work effort; a different participant allocates the production rewards between the investor and the worker. We find substantial heterogeneity in perceived deservingness, but also observe a tendency to allocate a greater share to labor than to capital. Our measure of the tendency to favor one input over the other predicts attitudes and policy-relevant voting behavior in support of policies that differentially reward capital and labor. Overall, our findings indicate that people perceive different input factors as differentially deserving and that such fairness views directly impact policy preferences.
POLICY PAPERS
- Renewable Energy and CO2 Abatement in Italy, with Claudio Marcantonini, 2017, Energy policy, 106, pp. 600-613
- An Analysis of Allowance Banking in the EU ETS, with Denny Ellerman and Aleksandar Zaklan, 2015, EUI RSCAS Working Paper N°29