A growing set of policies involve transfers conditioned upon socially desired actions, such as attending school or conserving forest. However, given a desire to maximize the impact of limited funds by avoiding transfers that do not change behavior, typically some potential recipients are excluded on the basis of their characteristics, their actions or at random. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study the behavior of individuals excluded on different bases from a new incentive that encourages real monetary donations to a public environmental conservation program. We show that the donations from the individuals who were excluded based on prior high contributions fell significantly. Yet the rationale used for exclusion mattered, in that none of the other selection criteria used as the basis for exclusion resulted in negative effects on contributions.
Most people pay their taxes most of the time, even if the expected disutility from enforcement is too low to deter tax evasion. One potential reason is tax morale and, more specifically, rule following. In a lab experiment, we show that the willingness to pay taxes just because participants are told they are supposed to pay is indeed pronounced. Yet compliance is reduced if participants learn that income is heterogeneous. The effect is driven by participants with the lowest income. The reduction obtains irrespective of the tax regime. If the tax is proportional to income, or progressive, participants become more skeptical about the willingness of participants with high income to comply.
This study employs monthly survey data and information obtained from media content analyses to investigate the potential link between (negativity in) economic news coverage and the pessimism in German unemployment expectations. For the period from 2001 to 2009, time-series estimates do not indicate a link in the short-run, but the cumulative effects of repeated media coverage affect long-run attitudes. A single negative report has a long-term effect similar to that of a positive one, but the quantitative dominance of negative over positive news causes an asymmetric reaction in unemployment expectations, which promotes pessimism.
This paper explores methods to study trust. In a variety of settings, answers to survey questions and choices in a trust game are obtained from student sample pools. Some subjects are approached by mail and execute their task at home whereas others participate in classroom experiments. No differences between the results obtained by these methods are observed. Furthermore, one additional group plays the trust game with purely hypothetical payments, and another receives random lottery payments. This changes trust behavior dramatically, whereas trustworthiness is unaffected. Subjects without any financial incentives exhibit less trust and their trust choices are significantly correlated with survey trust answers. There is no such correlation for the corresponding choices with real payments. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.