Research

It has been argued that ethnic heterogeneity negatively affects the willingness of the wealthier ethnic majority to redistribute resources to the typically less affluent ethnic minority. An open question in this context is whether this effect is driven by ethnic heterogeneity itself or the beliefs about immigrant’s characteristics. Using a general population sample of German citizens, we analyze how redistribution preferences depend on the recipients’ characteristics. We systematically vary information on (i) the recipient’s residency status (asylum seekers, economic migrants, German citizens) and (ii) their characteristics (educational attainment, engagement in voluntary work). These variations allow us to disentangle the effect of the recipient’s residency status and characteristics on redistribution preferences. Overall, we find discrimination against foreign recipients, with German citizens receiving significantly higher transfers. While having a university degree does not affect redistribution on average, participation in voluntary work significantly increases redistribution. This effect is particularly strong for asylum seekers compared to German citizens and economic immigrants. However, information having a university degree can reduce discrimination, particularly for asylum seekers.

Migration aspirations lie at the heart of self-selection into migration. In this paper, we study three questions: How do individual, household, origin-country, and destination-country characteristics interact? What factors are most influential? Who wants to leave in what context? We develop a new stylized model which integrates insights from the recently established aspirations-capabilities framework into standard utility maximization. We jointly investigate destination country factors (income and legal status), journey factors (costs and risks involved), and origin country factors (income, economic trends, and quality of public goods) using a conjoint choice experiment with 2708 participants in Uganda and Senegal. Our results show that all these dimensions significantly affect migration decision-making. However, the most important dimensions are the legal status and the risk of dying on the journey. Legal migration opportunities are even more influential for individuals that are content with their income situation at home. In line with the aspirations-capabilities framework, we show that higher life aspirations come with a higher willingness to migrate. 

Among measures to fight hospital-acquired infections, an emerging epidemic in many countries around the world, adoption of appropriate hand hygiene practices by healthcare workers is considered a priority. Despite their simplicity and effectiveness, healthcare workers’ compliance is poor, with most empirical studies finding compliance rates well below 50% in many countries. Management strategies to increase compliance are often based on the notion that non-compliance is a moral hazard problem, characterized by asymmetric information between hospital management and healthcare workers. In this study, we provide empirical evidence that an individual behavioral characteristic, known as overconfidence, induces many healthcare workers to overestimate their hand hygiene compliance and hence to underperform unknowingly and unintentionally.

This study contributes to the public debate on gender quotas and the literature on gender and risk-taking by analysing how the level of risk-taking within a group is influenced by its gender composition. In particular, we look at the shift of risk-taking between group and individual decisions and analyse to which extent this shift depends on the gender composition. We derive a gender-specific polarization hypothesis which states that compared to individual preferences, male-dominated groups will shift towards higher risk-taking than female-dominated ones. Our experimental tests reveal a systematic impact of gender composition on group shifts which supports our hypothesis and points into the direction that a higher share of females may prevent excessive risk-taking. 

Coverage: Spiegel Online, Welt, Focus

The formation of economic preferences in childhood and adolescence has long-term consequences for lifetime outcomes. We study in an experiment with 525 teenagers how both birth order and siblings’ sex composition affect risk, time, and social preferences. We find that second-born children are typically less patient, less risk-averse, and more trusting. However, siblings’ sex composition interacts importantly with birth order effects. Second-born children are more risk-taking only with same-sex siblings. For trust and trustworthiness, birth order effects are larger with mixed-sex siblings than in the single-sex case. Only for patience, siblings’ sex composition does not matter.

Ethnic discrimination is ubiquitous, and it has been shown to exert adverse effects on income redistribution. The reason is that a country’s ethnic majority, if richer than the average, may be unwilling to transfer resources to the country’s ethnic minorities if poorer than the average. A yet untested mechanism is that a country’s ethnic majority may reduce their work effort knowing that their income will finance redistribution to ethnic minorities. We test for this mechanism experimentally in triadic interactions. A German citizen acting as a worker is randomly matched with a recipient who can be another German, an economic migrant, or an asylum seeker in Germany. Workers know that another German citizen may transfer part of their earnings to the recipient. The recipient does not exert any work effort. Even if the recipient’s identity does not affect effort in the aggregate, social identity strongly moderates this relationship. Participants with a strong German identity, i.e., who report feeling close to other Germans, exert significantly less effort than other participants if the recipient is an asylum seeker. They also exert more effort when matched with a German recipient than an asylum seeker, while participants with a less strong German identity do the opposite. Moreover, participants with a strong German identity exert slightly more effort when matched with economic migrants than with asylum seekers, while others tend to do the opposite, albeit statistically insignificantly. Workers’ beliefs over the third party’s redistribution rate do not mediate such results and are generally inaccurate. 

We discuss the results of a study on the acceptance and effectiveness of cognitive and moral nudges using defaults and social information as examples. Our study participants classify these two dimensions of nudges differently. In addition to the choice mechanisms of nudges, this article also focuses on differences in social and personal goals in which nudges are to be applied. Our result is that moral nudges are preferred for social goals, whereas cognitive nudges are preferred for personal goals. From this we derive important consequences for the use of nudges as policy measures. Our results show that cognitive nudges are considered more effective by our study participants than moral nudges. However, the acceptance of such nudges differs according to the goals. 

Under mild assumptions, Shorrocks (1978) has proved that measured inequality must decrease when the period over which income is measured, the accounting period, increases. The present work seeks to shed light on the quantitative size of this effect using a huge representative German database for the period 1975–2004. Our results indicate that the choice of the accounting period not only seriously affects the level of inequality. We can also show that the size of the effect varies over time.