multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children this article presents evidence on the child quantity child quality trade off using quasi experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling sex composition as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables our sample includes groups with very high fertility an innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables strategies capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people to increase precision we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially overlapping parity specific subsamples our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity quality trade off

behavioural development economics lessons from field labs in the developing world abstract explanations of poverty growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour economic experiments especially those conducted in the field have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at variance with the traditional portrait we review this growing literature with an eye towards preference related experiments conducted in the field we also offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments we conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field and then offer a few ideas for future research

the socioeconomic consequences of teen childbearing reconsidered we present new estimates of the consequences of teen childbearing that take into account observed and unobserved family background heterogeneity comparing sisters who have timed their first births at different ages the estimation is conducted using data from the u s national longitudinal survey of young women excerpt

how to identify trust and reciprocity this paper uses a three games or triadic design to identify trusting and reciprocating behavior a large literature on single game trust and reciprocity experiments is based on the implicit assumption that subjects do not have altruistic or inequality averse other regarding preferences such experimental designs test compound hypotheses that include the hypothesis that other regarding preferences do not affect behavior in contrast experiments with the triadic design do discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or reciprocity and transfers resulting from other regarding preferences that are not conditional on the behavior of others decomposing trust from altruism and reciprocity from altruism or inequality aversion is critical to obtaining empirical information that can guide the process of constructing models that can increase the empirical validity of game theory

the impact of group membership on cooperation and norm enforcement evidence using random assignment to real social groups due to incomplete contracts efficiency of an organization depends on willingness of individuals to take non selfish actions such as cooperating when there is no incentive to do so or punishing inefficient actions by others organizations also constitute a social boundary or group we investigate whether this social aspect of organizations has an important benefit fostering unselfish cooperation and norm enforcement within the group but also whether there is a dark side in the form of hostility between groups our experiment provides the first evidence free from the confounding effect of self selection into groups individuals are randomly assigned to different platoons during a four week period of officer training in the swiss army we conduct choice experiments simultaneous prisoner s dilemma games with and without third party punishment in week three random assignment significantly increases willingness to cooperate with fellow platoon members assignment does not lead to hostility in the sense of vindictive punishment of outsiders but does affect norm enforcement enhancing willingness to enforce a norm of cooperation towards fellow platoon members this suggests that the social aspect of organizations motivates efficient behavior even when ordinary incentives fail and helps to explain practices designed to foster social ties or group identification within an organization this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

home alone supervision after school and child behavior as female participation in the labor force continues to grow in the us so too does reliance on non parental child care however the high cost of child care has impeded the ability of many working mothers to find sufficient child care for their children as a result as recently as 1998 over eight million children ages five to 14 spent time without adult supervision on a regular basis in the us i examine the effect of the lack of adult supervision after school on a panel of school age children using ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimation i find that children with adult supervision are less likely to skip school use alcohol or marijuana steal something or hurt someone these findings suggest that expanding after school or child care programs typically geared to preschool age children to accommodate more school age children may have important consequences for their human capital development and labor market outcomes later in life

designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice an overview of the issues abstract payments for environmental services pes have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external non market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services es in this introductory paper we set the stage for the rest of this special issue of ecological economics by reviewing the main issues arising in pes design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics we start with a discussion of pes definition and scope we proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of pes programs and then analyze how pes compares to alternative policy instruments finally we examine in detail two important aspects of pes programs their effectiveness and their distributional implications pes is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers pes is based on the beneficiary pays rather than the polluter pays principle and as such is attractive in settings where es providers are poor marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors an important distinction within pes is between user financed pes in which the buyers are the users of the es and government financed pes in which the buyers are others typically the government acting on behalf of es users in practice pes programs differ in the type and scale of es demand the payment source the type of activity paid for the performance measure used as well as the payment mode and amount the effectiveness and efficiency of pes depends crucially on program design

is there reciprocity in a reciprocal exchange economy evidence of gendered norms from a slum in nairobi kenya norms of reciprocity help enforce cooperative agreements in bilateral sequential exchange we examine the norms that apply in a reciprocal exchange economy in our one shot investment game in a nairobi slum people adhered to the norm of balanced reciprocity which obligates quid pro quo returns for any level of trust the norm is gendered with people more likely to comply when confronted with women rather than men and differs from conditional reciprocity prevalent in developed countries according to which greater trust is rewarded with proportionally larger returns balanced reciprocity produces less trust and trustworthiness and smaller gains from trade than conditional reciprocity jel c72 c91

payments for environmental services as an alternative to logging under weak property rights the case of indonesia decentralization reforms in indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost this paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services pes to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation we apply a game theoretical model of community firm interactions that explicitly considers two stylized conditions present in the indonesian context i community rights to the forest remain weak even after decentralization and ii the presence of logging companies interested in the commercial exploitation of the forest intuition may suggest that pes design should focus on those communities with the lowest expected payments from logging deals however we show that these communities may not be able to enforce a pes agreement i e they may not be able to prevent logging activities by timber companies moreover some communities would conserve the forest anyway in these cases pes would not lead to additional environmental gains most important the introduction of pes may increase a community s expected payoff from a logging agreement a failure to consider this endogeneity in expected payoffs could lead to communities opting for logging agreements despite pes simply allowing communities to negotiate better logging deals our results indicate that pes design is a complex task and that the costs of an effective pes system could potentially be much higher than expected from observing current logging fees using data collected in indonesia on actual logging fees received by communities we illustrate how the theoretical results could be used in empirical analysis to guide pes design our results are likely to be useful in other cases where local people make resource use decisions but have weak property rights over these resources and where external commercial forces are present the results highlight the importance of understanding the details of the local context in order to design pes programs appropriately

the effects of youth employment evidence from new york city lotteries programs to encourage labor market activity among youth including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the work opportunity tax credit can be supported by three broad rationales they may i provide contemporaneous income support to participants ii encourage work experience that improves future employment and or educational outcomes of participants and or iii keep participants out of trouble we study randomized lotteries for access to the new york city nyc summer youth employment program syep the largest summer youth employment program in the united states by merging syep administrative data on 294 100 lottery participants to irs data on the universe of u s tax records to new york state administrative incarceration data and to nyc administrative cause of death data in assessing the three rationales we find that i syep participation causes average earnings and the probability of employment to increase in the year of program participation with modest contemporaneous crowdout of other earnings and employment ii syep participation causes a modest decrease in average earnings for three years following the program and has no impact on college enrollment and iii syep participation decreases the probability of incarceration and decreases the probability of mortality which has important and potentially pivotal implications for analyzing the net benefits of the program jel codes j13 j45 j38 j21

trust and cooperation social capital and community resource management social capital is one of the main determinants of community resource management success we use the average amount sent in a trust game as a measure of social capital in five rural villages in india combining these experimental data with household surveys we analyze i how the amount sent is correlated with socio cultural community characteristics ii how social capital affects community resource management and iii to what extent experimental play is consistent with real on farm behavior in terms of providing a semi public good the results are interesting from a policy perspective and provide insight into bridging the gap between lab experiments and the field

choosing what i want versus rejecting what i do not want an application of decision framing to product option choice decisions abstract the authors examine the effects of using a subtractive versus an additive option framing method on consumers option choice decisions in three studies the former option framing method presents consumers with a fully loaded product and asks them to delete options they do not want the latter presents them with a base model and asks them to add the options they do want combined the studies support the managerial attractiveness of the subtractive versus the additive option framing method consumers tend to choose more options with a higher total option price when they use subtractive versus additive option framing this effect holds across different option price levels study 1 and product categories of varying price study 2 moreover this effect is magnified when subjects are asked to anticipate regret from their option choice decisions study 2 however option framing has a different effect on the purchase likelihood of the product category itself depending on the subject s initial inter

upstream downstream transactions and watershed externalities experimental evidence from kenya abstract where environmental policies or projects seek behavioral change understanding underlying norms and preferences is essential to securing environmental outcomes this study models a payment for environmental services intervention in an experimental field laboratory in nyanza province kenya upstream and downstream individuals are paired in a standard investment game in which the upstream mover s investment represents land use decisions and the downstream mover responds with a choice of compensation payment the experimental intervention introduces an enforcement treatment on the downstream movers compensation decisions for a single round underlying social preferences and identity appear to shape individual transactions between upstream and downstream individuals upstream first movers are sensitive to the removal of the enforcement on their downstream partners in the second round and make decisions consistent with crowding out of social preferences the results suggest that environmental interventions may affect resource decisions for individuals who are not themselves direct targets of enforcement

socio ecological explanations for crowding out effects from economic field experiments in southern africa abstract economic and psychological literature mentions three conditions under which the crowding out effect of pro social behaviour is likely to occur and to crowd out citizens moral obligations to behave co operatively i use a framed field experiment on joint extraction from a common pool resource cpr where the crowding out effect has already been reported before in combination with the trust game carried out in farming communities of namibia and south africa to replicate these conditions the research design and the cross cultural setting enable to explicitly control for these effects the results of the experiments support that the crowding out effect depends on the nature of the external intervention controlling vs supportive external intervention the degree of participants self determination high vs low self determination in the group a society s norms of trust and reciprocity high vs low trust within the society the results imply that outside regulations aiming to conserve natural resources risk worsening the situation when neglecting democratic legitimization as well as local community norms

subsidized contraception fertility and sexual behavior abstract we examine the impact of recent state level medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher income women and to medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise we show that the income based policy change reduced overall births to non teens by about 2 and to teens by over 4 estimates suggest a decline of 9 among newly eligible women the reduction in fertility appears to have been accomplished via greater use of contraception our calculations indicate that allowing higher income women to receive federally funded family planning cost on the order of 6 800 for each averted birth

repetition and reputation implications for trust and trustworthiness when institutions change institutions change in iraq the formerly communist countries and many private and public organizations but do people adapt to the new institutional environment and if so how quickly this paper examines institutional change how long it takes people to transition from one institutional environment to another or put differently whether old institutional regimes have an afterglow more specifically we study whether trust and trustworthiness can be fostered by first exposing people to an environment conducive to trust we are interested in whether intrinsic trust and trustworthiness can be induced in the long run by providing extrinsic incentives for trust and trustworthiness in the short run reputation systems may provide incentives for trustworthiness and trust direct reputationbuilding may occur in repeated games where pairs of subjects play the same stage game repeatedly but repeat transactions are not necessarily the rule in today s global economy in population games where agents are randomly re matched in every period indirect reputation systems are a potential substitute for personal interactions provided information about others past behavior is available on ebay for example buyers are willing to pay a premium of 8 1 percent of the selling price to a seller with an established good reputation paul resnick et al 2003 this paper examines experimentally to what degree indirect reputation building substitutes for direct reputation building in repeat interactions in the short run and analyzes the effects these environments have on behavior in the long run in contrast most earlier experimental studies focus on one shot and repeat interactions in the short run we compare the effects of direct and indirect reputation building in a binary choice trust game where a buyer the trustor can either interact with the seller the trustee or exit the trustee can either honor or exploit trust the payoffs are such that a money maximizing trustee prefers exploiting to honoring trust in a one shot game while a money maximizing trustor prefers not offering trust to being exploited the unique nash equilibrium of the single shot game predicts no trade figure 1 presents the game we implemented with the actual payoffs in cents used in our experiment subjects participate in the trust game in two blocks of 10 rounds each which is common knowledge in phase 1 the first 10 rounds they are confronted either with a standard one shot random matching treatment stranger or s a fixed pairs finitely repeated game treatment partner or p or bohnet kennedy school of government harvard university 79 jfk street cambridge ma 02139 e mail iris bohnet harvard edu huck department of economics and else university college london gower street london wc1e 6bt united kingdom e mail s huck ucl ac uk we thank rachel croson and the participants at the 2004 assa meetings for their helpful comments and jeffrey bielicki for his excellent research assistance we gratefully acknowledge financial support from the russell sage foundation the leverhulme trust and the economic and social research council u k via else 1 for a recent survey see james andreoni and rachel croson 2004 studies examining the effects of different institutional environments over time include bohnet et al 2001 and ernst fehr and simon gachter 2003 2 the experiments were computerized using urs fischbacher s 1999 z tree software the instructions are available upon request

policy persistence and rent extraction the existing literature has shown that special interest groups can have both growth enhancing and growth retarding effects on an economy in either case it is always assumed that the nature of the special interest groups remains constant over time the hypothesis of this paper is that a dynamic relationship exists between politicians and lobbyists i e that opportunities for rent extraction for special interest groups can evolve over time in the short run politicians may support projects proposed to them by lobbies because they yield clear economic benefits however continued governmental support may imply a cost to society and yield rents to the lobbies a theoretical framework in which established and new lobbies overlap is developed to model a government s incentives to behave in a manner consistent with the hypothesis in this framework voters can still rationally reelect politicians even if the latter support lobbies for an inefficiently long period of time because if they did not then the quality of the pool of new projects would deteriorate

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

a review essay on isabel sawhill s generation unbound drifting into sex and parenting without marriage and laurence steinberg s age of opportunity lessons from the new science of adolescence sawhill and steinberg approach risky behavior among youth from two different angles steinberg argues for intervention during the adolescent years to alter behavior in ways that prioritize patience and self regulation while sawhill advocates interventions that mitigate the negative effects of risky behavior both argue that disadvantaged youth suffer worse consequences as a result of risky behavior and therefore stand to gain the most from interventions while the authors develop strong arguments for adolescent interventions the existing evidence on their effectiveness is less compelling to reconcile the promise with the reality i argue that growing up in environments of significant uncertainty reduces the returns to forward thinking behavior in the daily lives of disadvantaged youths interventions to develop adolescent decision making skills so as to reduce risky behavior will not be effective if they are inconsistent with the incentives generated by a local environment that is often characterized by uncertainty

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

the impacts of family size on investment in child quality using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size i investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well being using data from the 1980 us census five percent public use micro sample 2sls results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with becker s quantity quality model a larger family generated by twins in a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school reduces the mother s labor force participation and increases the likelihood that parents divorce the impact of family size on a measure of child outcome such as grade retention is less clear the results indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being the 2sls estimates are statistically distinguishable from ols estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model

an incentive model of the effect of parental income on children economists explain the positive relationship between parental income and children s outcomes using an investment model building on work in psychology and sociology this paper emphasizes the importance of child rearing practices which vary with income i argue that parents ability to mold their children s behavior through pecuniary incentives is limited at low incomes leading to lower outcomes and increased reliance on nonpecuniary mechanisms such as corporal punishment my model generates a positive relationship between parental income and children s outcomes especially at low incomes and endogenously produces a relationship between parental income and child rearing practices empirical work confirms these implications

media influences on social outcomes the impact of mtv s 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing this paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed mtv reality show 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show we implement an instrumental variables iv strategy using local area mtv ratings data from a pre period to predict local area 16 and pregnant ratings the results imply that this show led to a 4 3 percent reduction in teen births an examination of google trends and twitter data suggest that the show led to increased interest in contraceptive use and abortion jel d12 j13 j16 l82 z13 it is a longstanding and open question how exposure to media images affects viewers behavior policy advocates and cultural observers worry in particular about the impact of exposure to sexual and violent content on adolescent behaviors in some circles the idea that teenagers respond to media content is a foregone conclusion but determining whether media images themselves cause teens to behave in certain ways is a difficult empirical task 1 this paper examines the impact of the mtv show 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing this show purports to show the difficult reality of becoming a teen mother as we document below 16 and pregnant has drawn large audiences among relevant subpopulations could exposure to these media images of pregnant teens and very young new moms have had an impact on how teens behave leading to changes in the likelihood of becoming teen mothers themselves