Research

PhD projects

Charitable behavior and public intervention: a survey experiment (with Bence Szabó)

In this paper we measure the extent of charitable behavior crowding out public intervention, and how this phenomenon affects the welfare of the poor.

To achieve this objective we collect novel survey data on a representative sample of the U.S. adult population. In the survey, respondents are asked to go through several hypothetical scenarios which are built starting from a simple model of public good contribution, in order to learn about their preferences and expectations regarding donations and taxation.

We find that when donations are available, government expenditure on the poor is lower, however, households-in-need are still better off due to disproportionately higher donations, corroborating the correlational evidence we find for U.S. counties. This means that, in our setting, private charity crowds out public intervention only to a limited extent. Moreover, the finding that the equilibrium tax rates in the no-donations scenario are not high enough to compensate for the lack of private charity suggests that, in relative terms, people are less driven by inequity aversion than by the direct utility of the act of donating (warm glow).

Our results indicate that in the United States the widespread availability of private charity plays a pivotal role in alleviating poverty, which government intervention cannot substitute for due to the structure of voters' preferences.

Extra-curricular internships and sorting by socio-economic status

This paper investigates whether, and due to which channel, highly educated workers differ in their propensity to choose an internship as their access point to the labor market according to their socio-economic background. As internships are characterized by very low levels of compensation, which is often not enough to cover for living expenses, they represent an expensive signalling mechanism that financially constrained students might fail to afford. At the same time, individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds might have systematically different expectations on future outcomes conditional on the type of access to the labor market.

In order to investigate this difference and the possible mechanisms behind it I plan to collect survey data on expected returns from internships and elicit career path choices in hypothetical but realistic scenarios from a sample of university students. The analysis of survey responses allows to shed light on individuals' choice mechanisms and their heterogeneity across different socioeconomic backgrounds.