Abstract:

Large pay disparities, such as the gap between executives and typical workers, raise the question of how people justify or contest unequal pay. Many production processes feature strong complementarities: a few workers occupy pivotal roles whose marginal contribution far exceeds that of others, even when they exert the same effort. We study fairness judgments in an online experiment in which one worker in a team is pivotal: without this worker, the team produces nothing. Impartial spectators allocate the team's earnings after observing equal effort but different marginal contributions. Varying the number of workers changes the pivotal worker's contribution while holding effort constant; varying whether the pivotal role is assigned at random or on the basis of exclusive knowledge changes its justification. About half of the spectators pay the pivotal worker more than the equal split. Larger teams do not increase this share but increase how much these spectators pay: the pivotal worker's pay roughly doubles from teams of three to teams of nine, about half of the increase implied by the Shapley value. Assigning the pivotal role on the basis of knowledge increases the share of spectators who reward pivotality, without making them more generous. Perceived stress of the pivotal worker does not explain these patterns. Spectators who reward pivotality differ from those who split equally in the reasons they give, in their views on the fairness of income differences and in their political orientation.

Status: data analysis

Abstract:

This study investigates how the source of inequality affects trust and how this contrasts to observed behaviour. In an online experiment, we combine a binary trust game with a dictator game and independently vary both the source of inequality and the beneficiary’s endowment. Participants receive a high or low endowment through either luck or performance in a preceding task, and are then matched with either a rich or a poor beneficiary. This design allows us to distinguish how inequality changes trust beliefs from how it changes the motives governing transfers: a rich trustor may transfer to a poor beneficiary out of a concern for redistribution rather than an expectation of repayment, causing the canonical trust game to classify generosity as trust. Focusing on the beliefs about trustwothiness as a measure of trust, we find that the source of inequality substantially changes whom to trust. In a meritocratic society, where endowments are earned, rich participants’ beliefs about trustworthiness do not vary with the beneficiary’s endowment: rich people perceive rich and poor trustees as similarly trustworthy. In a non‑meritocratic society, where endowments are assigned randomly, however, they trust poor trustees less than rich trustees. These differences in beliefs are partly obscured in observed transfers: randomly advantaged trustors are only half as trusting towards poor trustees as towards rich trustees, yet their transfer rate falls by only approximately 10\%. These findings show that the source of inequality shapes whom people trust, while redistributive motives can mask this effect in standard behavioural measures.

Status: writing the draft + more data collection

Abstract:

We study to what extent including evaluator subjectivity in tournament decisions affects the doc- umented gender gap in competition. We conduct a large-scale, pre-registered online experiment (𝑛 = 7310) in which workers choose between a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive pay- ment scheme whose payout depends on being selected by an incentivised human evaluator. By ran- domly varying whether the evaluator can observe the worker’s gender across a male-stereotyped and a non-stereotyped task, we exogenously induce the scope for anticipated discrimination. In the male-stereotyped task, gender revelation breaks the link between women’s objective perfor- mance beliefs and their beliefs about being selected: conditional on the subjective probability of having the best signal, moderately confident women report significantly lower selection expecta- tions when their gender is known. This distortion reduces female entry rates, with the strongest effects among non-risk averse participants: those who made up the majority of the competitor pool when their gender was concealed. The revelation of gender in the male-stereotyped domain particularly effects low-ability women, destabilising the negative association between ability and competition among females. We validate that this effect is driven by the anticipation of gender dis- crimination and not by a preference for opting out of settings in which gender is made salient: in a non-stereotyped task we find no change in beliefs nor in competition behaviour when their gender is revealed to the evaluator. Our findings suggest that the extent to which the gender competition gap distorts female labour supply may be underestimated in the face of the potential for evaluator bias, even before it is enacted. At the same time, evaluator behaviour is heterogeneous: across 18,900 evaluation decisions in the male‑stereotyped task, women are favoured on average, particularly by female evaluators. A complementary experiment shows that participants correctly anticipate these evaluator‑gender differences. Together, the results show that beliefs about discrimination, and not only discrimination itself, can deter women from competing in male‑stereotyped domains.

Status: writing the draft

Abstract:

Italy’s North–South divide is among the most persistent within-country gaps in Europe, yet little is known about whether the two macro-areas differ in what they regard as a fair distribution of income. I study fairness views among 95 university students born in Northern or Southern Italy, separating what individuals would do themselves from what they believe their regional group considers appropriate. In a spectator setting where inequality between two workers stems from either luck or merit, participants rate the social appropriateness of every possible redistribution in an incentivised norm-elicitation task (Krupka and Weber, 2013), choose how much they would redistribute, and estimate how others in each region rated the choice not to redistribute. In both regions, redistribution is seen as less appropriate when inequality reflects merit. Perceived norms differ across regions, with Northern participants reporting a markedly more meritocratic norm, while individual redistributive choices are similar in the two areas. Participants in both regions overestimate how acceptable their own group finds leaving inequality in place, especially when it arises from luck, and their perception of the norm closely tracks their own choice. These results suggest that regional differences in fairness norms may rest more on beliefs about others than on underlying preferences.

Status: R&R at Journal of Human Capital

Paper: CEPR Discussion Paper [pdf]

Abstract:

This paper presents a novel app-based survey designed to elicit beliefs from parents of preschoolers about the impact of parental time investments on children’s well-being. The survey encompasses a wide range of activities that a child can perform and allows to differentiate the intrinsic value of the activity from the significance of parental engagement. Through exploratory factor analysis, four key factors emerge: beliefs on the role of autonomy, parental engagement, culture and managing conflict. Using two distinct samples from the same population, we show that parental belief indicators exhibit strong internal validity and consistency. Notably, they correlate with engagement and the quality of daily parent-child interactions, as measured by 24-hour parental time diaries. The association of parental beliefs on engagement and parental time investments is large and roughly equivalent to the difference in time investments between parents employed part-time and full-time. A one standard-deviation in the relative importance parents attribute to their presence leads to about 1.5 hours more of engaged time, net of individual time-invariant unobserved factors.