procedural unfair wage differentials and their effects on unethical behavior in this paper we investigate how payment procedures that are deemed unfair can spur unethical behavior towards innocent coworkers in a real effort experiment in our discrimination treatment a highly unfair payment procedure with wage differentials half the workforce is randomly selected and paid by relative performance whereas the remaining receives no payment a joy of destruction game measures unethical behavior subsequently non earners in discrimination destroy significantly more than in the non discriminatory control treatments in discrimination unethical behavior is generally high for all non earners independent of individual inequality aversion and relative performance beliefs in the control treatments inequality aversion is the main driver of destructive behavior

assessing the regional economic impacts of renewable energy sources a literature review abstract the transition of the global energy system is one of the main trends that offers opportunities as well as challenges for the economy most literature evaluates the impact of that transition at a national level that view is broadened towards a regional scale due to the lower energy density of many renewable energy sources renewable energy generation will be more decentralised leading to potentially significant changes in the regional economy when transitioning to a renewable energy system in this paper the current literature and methods of assessing regional economic impacts of a transition to renewable energy generation is reviewed the findings suggest an overall need to clearly define the topics such as technologies that are assessed and the evaluated time period a guideline for a regional impact assessment is provided focusing on the suitability of applied impact assessment methods employment ratios supply chain analyses input output models and computable general equilibrium models

the effects of scarcity on cheating and in group favoritism abstract we study the impact of scarcity on cheating and in group favoritism using a two period lab in the field experiment with low income coffee farmers in a small isolated village in guatemala during the coffee harvesting months farmers in this village experience a significant income boost from selling their coffee beans however during the non harvesting months they experience a substantial decline in income inducing a pronounced state of scarcity while other factors remain similar using this distinctive variance in income we first conduct our experiment before the coffee harvest scarcity period we then repeat the experiment with the same group of subjects during the harvest season abundance period first using the fischbacher and follmi heusi 2013 die roll paradigm we find that subjects cheat at high levels in both periods when they are the beneficiaries of the cheating scarcity does not impact this cheating behavior secondly using subjects natural village identity we find significant in group favoritism for cheating in the abundance period which disappears during the scarcity period finally using a dictator game we show that this finding holds even when the cost of favoring an in group member is monetary rather than moral

why political reservations many countries are amending their political systems to set aside positions to groups such as women and racial or religious minorities that are perceived as being disadvantaged using evidence from india this article assesses the case for these reservations jel h4 o15 several countries have introduced procedures either explicit quotas or forms of gerrymandering to ensure political representation of disadvantaged groups such as women or ethnic minorities in 2001 quotas for women in parliaments were in force in more than 30 countries in india seats are reserved for historically disadvantaged groups scheduled castes or sc and scheduled tribes or st in federal or state legislative assemblies and for both historically disadvantaged groups and women at all levels of the panchayat system the system of decentralized decision making on the basis of evidence accumulated about the indian experience this paper reviews the case for reservation

affirmative action or just discrimination a study on the endogenous emergence of quotas affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets little is known however about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects we experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules against or abstain if approved by the vote a quota rule is implemented that favors women in one treatment but members of an artificially created group based on random color assignment in another treatment we find that quota rules based on gender are implemented frequently and do not affect the performance of men and women in a contest quota rules based on an arbitrary criterion however are less often approved and lead to strong individual reactions of advantaged and disadvantaged group members and to efficiency losses these results show that the effects of affirmative action policies largely depend on whether these policies are viewed favorably within the affected groups

the challenges of determining the employment effects of renewable energy abstract the benefits of promoting renewable energy are regularly claimed to be energy security climate change mitigation and job creation while the first two benefits are generally accepted the impact of renewable energy on employment is still disputed this paper presents a discussion of the various factors that influence the analysis of renewable energy and its impact on employment the advantages and disadvantages of input output methods and analysis methods are discussed as well as the issues surrounding the measurement of job creation a critical evaluation of the literature reveals factors that should be considered when completing a study about renewable energy and employment labour intensity of renewables cost increases and availability of investments counting job losses job quality and skills model assumptions and sources of information analytical studies using extensive surveys were found to be more appropriate for regional studies while input output methods were better suited to national and international studies

the politics of public good provision evidence from indian local governments this paper uses village and household survey data from south india to examine how political geography and politician identity impacts on public good provision we provide evidence that the nature of this relationship varies by type of public good for high spillover public goods residential proximity to elected representative matters in contrast for low spillover public goods sharing the politician s group identity is what matters jel d78 h40

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

discrimination social identity and durable inequalities what are the mechanisms by which societal discrimination affects individual achievement and why do the effects of past discrimination endure once legal barriers are removed we report the findings of two experiments in village india that suggest that the mechanisms of discrimination operate in part within the individuals who are members of the groups who have been discriminated against we demonstrate that publicly revealing an individual s membership in such a group alters his behavior in ways that make the effects of past discrimination persist over time a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat finds that stereotyped based expectations affect individual performance in the domain of the stereotype a study by jeff stone et al 1999 is illustrative when college students were asked to perform a task described as diagnostic of natural athletic ability blacks stereotyped as better athletes but worse students than whites performed better than whites when the same test was presented as diagnostic of sports intelligence the performance of blacks declined that of whites improved and the racial gap was reversed evidence suggests that a mediating factor in stereotype threat is a change in self confidence mara cadinu et al 2005 in our studies we investigated whether the public revelation of social identity caste affects cognitive task performance and responses to economic opportunities by young boys in village india subjects were sixth and seventh graders drawn from the two ends of the caste hierarchy we asked subjects to learn and then perform a task under incentives and we manipulated whether their peers in the experimental session knew their caste caste is well suited to this manipulation because unlike race gender and ethnicity there are no unambiguous outward markers of caste among young boys six subjects generally from six different villages participated in each experimental session in the control condition the subjects were anonymous within the six person group in the experimental conditions the experimenter publicly revealed subjects names and caste in the task solving mazes in which performance was studied here the low caste subjects in the anonymous condition did not perform significantly differently from high caste subjects but when caste identity was publicly revealed in a mixed caste group a significant caste gap emerged the caste gap was due to a 20 percent decline in the average number of mazes solved by the low caste the study shows that publicly revealing the social identity of an individual can change his behavior even when that information is irrelevant to payoffs our results are a generalization of the literature on stereotype threat like that literature we find that individuals performance is more in accordance with the stereotype of the group when group membership is made salient in some way unlike that literature salience in our experiments depends on the public revelation of social identity and more importantly we do not argue that the domain of the tasks undertaken by discussants rachel croson university of pennsylvania iris bohnet harvard university stefano dellavigna university of california berkeley

an experiment on risk taking and evaluation periods does the period over which individuals evaluate outcomes influence their investment in risky assets results from this study show that the more frequently returns are evaluated the more risk averse investors will be the results are in line with the behavioral hypothesis of myopic loss aversion which assumes that people are myopic in evaluating outcomes over time and are more sensitive to losses than to gains the results have relevance for the equity premium puzzle and also for the marketing strategies of fund managers

the spillover effects of gender quotas on dishonesty we experimentally test for spillover effects of gender quotas on subsequent unrelated unethical behavior we find that introducing quotas has no systematic effect on unethical behavior for both genders high performing competitive females are more likely to display unethical behavior than their male counterparts

can mandated political representation increase policy influence for disadvantaged minorities theory and evidence from india accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities this paper exploits the institutional features of political reservation as practiced in indian states to examine the role of mandated political representation in providing disadvantaged groups influence over policy making ifind that political reservation has increased transfers to groups which benefit from the mandate this finding also suggests that complete policy commitment may be absent in democracies as is found in this case jel d72 d78 hl 1 h50

innovation diffusion public policy and local initiative the case of wood fuelled district heating systems in austria abstract this paper comprises a three level study on wood fuel utilisation for district heating in austria first we discuss the framework conditions for the diffusion in austria of rural biomass district heating bdh plants an energy conversion plant type which constituted a real innovation in the 1980s second we describe the diffusion of bdh systems in the austrian province of vorarlberg where a variety of biomass energy systems have been promoted by capital grants since 1993 as part of a dedicated bioenergy promotion programme third the paper contains a case study of a 2 mw bdh plant put into operation in 2000 in rankweil a small market town located in vorarlberg on the east side of the rhine valley analysis of the plant history reveals that an oversupply of forest residues caused by devastating storms and forest diseases together with the more general need to rejuvenate severely over aged forest stands created strong incentives to form local actor networks and initiatives to push for the adoption and diffusion of centralised biomass heating systems in rural areas in addition intensive lobbying and strong political and public support were necessary to successfully combat interventions by both the natural gas industry and influential gas supplied industrial enterprises finally a capital grant of 45 of eligible investment costs as well as careful capacity expansion and other planning significantly improved and safeguarded the economic viability of the plant these considerations combined with a dedicated forest restructuring programme render the plant one of the most successful integrated forestry and bdh projects in vorarlberg and an important model for later adopters overall the analysis sheds some light on the role of public policy local actors and economic and other framework conditions on the market diffusion dynamics of bdh in austria

economic and co2 mitigation impacts of promoting biomass heating systems an input output study for vorarlberg austria this paper reports on an empirical investigation about the economic and co2 mitigation impacts of bioenergy promotion in the austrian federal province of vorarlberg we study domestic value added employment and fiscal effects by means of a static input output analysis the bioenergy systems analysed comprise biomass district heating pellet heating and automated wood chip heating systems as well as logwood stoves and boilers ceramic stoves and buffer storage systems the results indicate that gross economic effects are significant regarding both investment and operation of the systems and that the negative economic effects caused by the displacement of conventional decentralised heating systems might be in the order of 20 40 finally co2 mitigation effects are substantial contributing already in 2004 around 35 of the 2010 co2 mitigation target of the land vorarlberg for all renewable energy sources

loss aversion and lying behavior abstract we theoretically show that loss averse agents are more likely to lie to avoid receiving a low payoff after a random draw the lower the ex ante probability of this bad outcome the ex ante expected payoff increases as the bad outcome becomes less likely and hence the greater is the loss avoided by lying we demonstrate robust support for this theory by reanalyzing the results from the extant literature and with a new experiment that varies the outcome probabilities and is run double anonymous

the spillover effects of affirmative action on competitiveness and unethical behavior we conduct an artefactual field experiment to examine various spillover effects of affirmative action policies in the context of castes in india we test a if individuals who enter tournaments in the presence of affirmative action policies remain competitive after the policy has been removed and b whether having been exposed to the policy generates unethical behavior and spite against subjects from the category who has benefited from the policy we find that these policies substantially increase the confidence and the competitiveness of the backward caste members however we find no spillover effect on confidence and competitiveness once affirmative action is withdrawn any gain in competitiveness due to the policy is then entirely wiped out furthermore the strong existing bias of the dominant category against the backward category is not significantly aggravated by affirmative action except when individuals learn that they have lost the previous competition

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

woody biomass processing potential economic impacts on rural regions abstract this paper estimates the economic and environmental impacts of introducing woody biomass processing wbp into a rural area in central appalachia wbp is among the most promising additions to energy generation portfolios for reducing import dependency while at the same time providing economic opportunity to stimulate regional economies especially in rural regions where economic development options are often limited we use an input output framework to assess wbp under three different pathways fast pyrolysis ethanol and coal biomass to liquids we find that the proposed wbp will increase regional output by 0 5 1 3 of gross regional product it will increase income by 17 32 to 51 31 million dollars each year and regional employment by 218 1 1127 8 jobs depending on the chosen pathway of these impacts the direct portions are 63 77 of the total impact depending on the chosen pathway the economic analysis and the results from the accompanying environmental assessment show that only the ethanol pathway has both economic and environmental benefits we conclude that because long run economic development strategies in rural regions are limited and negative impacts do not alter dramatically the regional environmental profile regional policymakers should include wbp among their development portfolio options

how costly is diversity affirmative action in light of gender differences in competitiveness affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy however the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates this paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job we evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high performing women fail to enter competitions they can win we show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry the response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women the consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

spite and development in a wide variety of settings spiteful preferences would constitute an obstacle to cooperation trade and thus economic development this paper shows that spiteful preferences the desire to reduce another s material payoff for the mere purpose of increasing one s relative payoff are surprisingly widespread in experiments conducted in one of the least developed regions in india uttar pradesh in a one shot trust game the authors find that a large majority of subjects punish cooperative behavior although such punishment clearly increases inequality and decreases the payoffs of both subjects in experiments to study coordination and to measure social preferences the findings reveal empirical patterns suggesting that the willingness to reduce another s material payoff either for the sake of achieving more equality or for the sake of being ahead is stronger among individuals belonging to high castes than among those belonging to low castes because extreme social hierarchies are typically accompanied by a culture that stresses status seeking it is plausible that the observed social preference patterns are at least partly shaped by this culture thus an exciting question for future research is the extent to which different institutions and cultures produce preferences that are conducive or detrimental to economic development

the response by adults to increases in cigarette prices by sociodemographic characteristics cigarette excise taxes are widely viewed by health economists as an effective tool to reduce cigarette consumption however those opposed to increasing cigarette excise taxes often state that the taxes unfairly target certain segments of the population notably the poor and minorities some of this opposition may have been fueled by a lack of understanding of how the tax will affect the health and welfare of various demographic groups of interest this article provides guidance to policy makers by estimating price elasticities among adults by gender income age and race or ethnicity women adults with income at or below the median income young adults african americans and hispanics are most responsive to cigarette price increases for example adults with income at or below the median are more than four times as price responsive as those with income above the median