Pub[αώ]

The reliance on student samples has long been a subject of debate in experimental approaches to studying behaviour. We contribute to this discussion by looking at differences in financial behaviour between a student and a non-student sample in three sets of lab experiments conducted in Spain, Germany and Poland (n=857). Participants from both samples switched more often and made better financial decisions after they received a message encouraging them to switch financial service providers. While the size of the effect on switching frequency was comparable between the two samples, the effect on switching quality was significantly stronger on non-students. Further analysis suggests this is due to a better performance of students before the prompt leaving less room for improvement by the reminder. Results suggest that experimental evidence derived from students should be generalized with caution. 

We examine the role of political alignment and the electoral business cycle on municipality revenues in Greece for the period 2003–2010. The misallocation of resources for political gain represents a waste of resources with significant negative effects on local growth and effective decentralization. The focus of our analysis is municipality mayors since they mediate the relationship between central government and voters and hence can influence the effectiveness of any potential pork-barrelling activity. A novel panel data set combining the results of two local and three national elections with annual municipality budgets is used to run a fixed-effects econometric model. This allows us to identify whether the political alignment between mayors and central government affects municipality financing. We examine this at different stages of local and national electoral cycles, investigating both direct intergovernmental transfers (grants) and the remaining sources of local revenues (own revenues, loans). We find that total revenues are significantly higher for aligned municipalities in the run-up to elections due to higher intergovernmental transfers. We also find evidence that the 2008 crisis has reduced such pork-barrelling activity. This significant resource misallocation increases vertical networking dependency and calls for policy changes promoting greater decentralization and encouraging innovation in local revenue raising. 

Empirical evidence suggests that obese people are discriminated in different social environments, such as the work place. Yet, the degree to which obese people are internalizing and adjusting their own behavior as a result of this discriminatory behavior has not been thoroughly studied. We develop a proxy for measuring experimentally the “self-weight bias” by giving to both self-identified obese (n = 90) and non-obese (n = 180) individuals the opportunity to request a positive amount of money after having performed an identical task. Consistent with the System Justification Theory, we find that self-identified obese individuals, due to a preexisting false consciousness, request significantly lower amounts of money than non-obese ones. A within subject comparison between self-reports and external monitors' evaluations reveals that the excessive weight felt by the “self” but not reported by evaluators captures the self-weight bias not only for obese but also for non-obese individuals. Linking our experimental results to the supply side of the labor market, we argue that self-weight bias, as expressed by lower salary requests, enhances discriminatory behavior against individuals who feel, but may not actually be, obese and consequently exacerbates the wage gap across weight. 

Many risky actions are carried out under the influence of alcohol. However, the effect of alcoholic intoxication over the willingness to take risks is complex and still remains unclear. We conduct an economic field experiment in a natural, drinking, and risk-taking environment to analyze how both actual and self-estimated blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels influence subjects' choices over monetary lotteries with constant expected value. Our results reveal a negative impact of both actual and self-estimated BAC levels on risk taking. However, for male and young subjects, we find a positive relationship between BAC underestimation (a pattern of estimation error that mainly occurs at high BAC levels) and the willingness to choose riskier lotteries. Our findings suggest that a risk compensation mechanism is activated only when individuals' own intoxication level is consciously self-perceived to be high but not underestimated. We conclude therefore that human propensity to engage in risky activities under the influence of alcohol is not due to an enhanced preference for risky choices. In addition to the suggestion in the existing literature that such propensity is due to a weakened ability to perceive risks, our results indicate that an impaired self-perception of own intoxication level may also be an important factor.