Research

Transfers of resources in dictator games vary significantly by the characteristics of recipients. We focus on social norms and demonstrate that variation in the recipient changes both giving and injunctive norms and may offer an explanation for differences in giving. We elicit generosity using dictator games, and social norms using incentivized coordination games, with two different recipient types: an anonymous student and a charitable organization. A within-subjects design ensures that other factors are held constant. Our results show that differences in giving behavior are closely related to differences in social norms of giving across contexts. Controlling for individual differences in beliefs about the norm, subjects do not weight compliance with the norms in the student recipient or charity recipient dictator game differently. These results suggest that the impact of context on giving co-occurs with an impact on social norms.

Introduction: Most work on social identity, defined as one's sense of self derived from membership to social groups, focuses on a single identity and its behavioral consequences. But a central insight of social identity theory is that people belong to multiple social groups, derive self-esteem from multiple identities and care to conform to the norms for those identities. However, very little work has turned its attention to understanding when and how multiple social identities interact. We motivate hypotheses with a framework that extends a social identity model to include multiple identities.

Methods: Using a longitudinal sample (N > 600) of university students located primarily in Texas and throughout the US, we use university social identity, and the associated university norms, to characterize COVID related social distancing norms between April and October of 2020 and then unpack how another identity, the student's political identity, impacts perception of those norms.

Results: Despite incentives to do otherwise, we find that beliefs about university norms differ depending on the respondent's political identity. We interpret this as a spillover effect of attitudes from one identity to another.

Discussion: We relate our results back to a model of social identity, to the literature on spillovers where such psychological spillovers are hard to empirically identify, and to methods for future work on identity and spillovers.

This paper explores how default options influence perception of the social norm though changes in tipping behavior where consumers can use a suggested default or manually enter a tip amount. To identify the impact suggested tip levels have on behavior, I take advantage of the variation of credit payment vendors within the New York City taxi industry. Using both timing of the payment screen installations and variation across taxis in the technology vendor, I find that a five percentage point increase in the default tip percentages results in decreased default selection, albeit an increase in frequency of manual tips. Furthermore, I find that this increase is significantly greater for individuals who place relatively lower weight on their norm belief. This research demonstrates how the interaction of implicit social norms and cognitive costs together explain the `trade-off' phenomenon within the default literature where following an increase in defaults, the propensity to leave a default contribution decreases while the average contribution increases. The results of this research provides a practical perspective for firms considering the implementation of default suggestions.

Previous research in economics, social psychology, and sociology has produced compelling evidence that social norms influence behavior. In this paper we apply the Krupka and Weber (2013) norm elicitation procedure and present U.S. and non-U.S. born subjects with two scenarios for which tipping and punctuality norms are known to vary across countries. We elicit shared beliefs by having subjects match appropriateness ratings of different actions (such as arriving late or on time) to either another random subject or to a subject from their native country. We also elicit personal beliefs without the matching task. We test whether the responses from the coordination task can be interpreted as social norms by comparing responses from the coordination game with ex-ante identified social norms. We compare responses elicited with the matching tasks to those elicited without the matching task to test whether the coordination device itself is essential for identifying social norms. We find that appropriateness ratings for different actions vary with the reference group in the matching task. Further, the ratings obtained from the matching task vary in a manner consistent with the ex-ante identified social norms of that reference group.  Thus, we find that shared beliefs correspond more closely to externally validated social norms compared to personal beliefs. Second, we highlight the importance that reference groups (for the coordination task) can play.

In 2016, Congress created the Cyber Excepted Service (CES) and granted the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) flexibilities when setting compensation to support the recruitment and retention of personnel who are critical to the DoD cyber warfare mission. To justify a market-based permanent pay adjustment, there must be evidence that existing compensation is insufficient to attract and retain a required number of qualified employees. A persistent labor shortage signifies that compensation is insufficient and can be identified by high employee turnover or difficulty in filling posted vacancies.

In this report, the authors analyze the labor demand and supply for seven DoD cyber work roles that were collectively identified as high priority by the service components and the Office of the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO). The authors provide a framework for adjusting pay according to economic theory, identify private-sector occupational counterparts for the seven work roles, discuss findings from DoD employment and compensation questionnaires completed by CES organizations, compare characteristics and life-cycle pay between DoD cyber civilians and their private-sector counterparts, and make recommendations for the DoD CIO when setting compensation policy.

Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEP) have been shown to have significant impacts on youth outcomes such as reducing violent crime, increasing high school graduation, and boosting subsequent employment and wages (Heller, 2014; Gelber et al., 2016; Leos-Urbel, 2014; Kessler et al., 2022; Modestino, 2019; Modestino and Paulsen, 2022). Much of this research is based on lotteries from oversubscribed programs. But what happens when jobs cannot be allocated using simple random assignment due to heterogeneous preferences from employers and youth participants? During the summer of 2022, we obtained daily data snapshots from the hiring platform used by the City of Boston to match youth to summer jobs. These data provide a unique glimpse into both employer and applicant behavior to better understand youth labor market dynamics and document how the job matching process unfolds within a youth workforce development program. Using this novel data set, we explore youth job application behavior, employer selection behavior, and disparities created by onboarding. We find that roughly one-third of youth fail to complete the application process and among those that apply to at least one job, the pool of applicants is less likely to be Hispanic compared to the population of youth age 14-17 years. Our results indicate that despite having honorable goals of reducing inequality, youth workforce development programs that face heterogeneity on both sides of the job matching process are likely to result in job placements that perpetuate the inequities found in the labor market in the absence of random selection.

Using identity theory and a factorial vignette survey experiment, we test for the presence of implicit contextual, gender, race and sexual orientation bias in social norms that govern college students’ sexual interactions. The theoretical framework characterizes how differences in the appropriateness of behaviors may arise due to an actor’s identity. We model this type of bias as a form of statistical discrimination, in which the bias or discrimination arises from imperfect information rather than racial, gender, or sexual-orientation animus. We use an experiment to test our predictions. The experiment uses an incentive compatible survey protocol to identify the impact of implicit race, gender and sexual orientation bias on second order beliefs. Our results show that context significantly alters perceptions of appropriate behavior and that white heterosexual male actions are viewed more negatively than other reference identities.

Reincarceration rates in the United States are extremely high. One reason that individuals coming out of prison may find it difficult to avoid criminal activity is that they face significant barriers to obtaining legal employment. As such, lowering the barriers to employment following a criminal record could help break the reincarceration cycle. In 2012, Ohio introduced a method for prior offenders to signal their rehabilitative status, namely through obtaining a Certificate of Qualification for Employment (CQE). Although such certificates of rehabilitation are available in 16 states, much less is known about their rehabilitative effects. Using individual-level CQE petition records, we implement a judge-IV estimation strategy to estimate the causal effect of obtaining a CQE on subsequent crime. In addition to convictions, we also analyze the effect of CQEs on subsequent bookings at the county-level. This project will be one of the first to provide causal estimates of how judicial certificates affect recidivism.

We explore how preferences for competition influence undergraduate STEM outcomes. First, we introduce an asynchronous elicitation task that measures preferences for competition by a tournament entry decision  where performance is measured by one's SAT/ACT math score. We demonstrate that this measure is comparable to the tournament entry decision in Niederle and Vesterlund (2007). We estimate the impact that competitiveness, measured during a student's Sophomore year, has on undergraduate STEM outcomes. For males, competitiveness increases the probability of obtaining a STEM degree, but there is no such effect for females. Furthermore, this gendered effect of competitiveness is robust to conditioning on those interested in STEM when entering university and to non-Engineering STEM pathways. We leverage the university's administrative records to show that even controlling for high school achievement, competitiveness still has a heterogeneous effect on STEM outcomes by gender. Using mitigation analysis, we explore the channels in which competitiveness explains early achievement (first-year STEM G.P.A.) versus persistence (STEM degree). The results of this research highlights that the effect of competitiveness on STEM is more nuanced that previously understood and provides better prescriptions to address the leaky STEM pipeline.

Florida is currently one of only a handful of states that does not restore civil rights upon completion of a sentence for felons. Instead, persons with a prior felony conviction must apply for civil rights restoration through a constitutionally authorized process known as clemency. Civil rights revocation not only revokes the right to vote, but also denies eligibility of certain occupational licenses and state-funded scholarships. Over the past 26 years, the Rules of Executive Clemency have been amended such that approval became automatic for those eligible between 2007 to 2011. Outside of this time period, however, clemency required an application, hearing, and a mandatory waiting period. It is unknown, a priori, if such policy changes influenced labor market outcomes, voting behavior, or educational attainment, any of which may affect incentives for convicted felons to re-offend. As an aggregate measure of these channels, I analyze the casual link between civil rights restoration and rates of recidivism. To establish causality, this paper uses changes in the Rules of Executive Clemency affecting ex-felons' ability to restore their civil rights in order to identify the impact of civil rights restoration on rates of recidivism.

This study analyzes the influence of suggestions on tip amounts, tip percentages, the probability of selecting a default option, and manual tip amounts. More specifically, this paper looks at how varying tip suggestions either in dollar amounts versus percentages influences outcomes of interest. The study utilizes a unique dataset provided from a local coffee shop. As the Square point of sale platform changes tip prompts discontinuously at the $10 threshold, I employ a regression discontinuity model to evaluate the influence of a change in tip prompts.