| 1. |
- Almas, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Willingness to Compete : Family Matters
- 2016
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Ingår i: Management science. - : Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). - 0025-1909 .- 1526-5501. ; 62:8, s. 2149-2162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper studies the role of family background in explaining differences in the willingness to compete in a cognitive task. By combining data from a lab experiment conducted with a fairly representative sample of adolescents in Norway and high-quality register data on family background, we show that family background is fundamental in two important ways. First, boys from low socioeconomic status families are less willing to compete than boys from better-off families, even when controlling for confidence, performance, risk preferences, time preferences, social preferences, and psychological traits. Second, family background is crucial for understanding the large gender difference in the willingness to compete. Girls are much less willing to compete than boys among children from better-off families, whereas we do not find any gender difference in willingness to compete among children from low socioeconomic status families. Our data suggest that the main explanation of the role of family background is that the father's socioeconomic status is strongly associated with boys' willingness to compete. We do not find any association between the willingness to compete for boys or girls and the mother's socioeconomic status or other family characteristic that may potentially shape competition preferences, including parental equality and sibling rivalry.
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| 2. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Adverse Selection into Competition : Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in Tanzania
- 2020
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An influential literature has shown that women are less willing to compete than men, and the gender gap in competition may contribute to explaining gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes. This study reports from a large-scale randomized controlled trial of a women empowerment program in Tanzania targeting young women at the end of secondary school. Combining the randomized controlled trial, a lab-in-the-field experiment and survey data, we provide evidence suggesting that the program caused adverse selection into competition: low performing women competed more, while there was no effect on the high performers. We provide a theoretical framework to illustrate an adverse selection mechanism that may contribute to explain why the program only affected the willingness to compete among low performers. Our results emphasize the importance of understanding sorting mechanisms and heterogeneous treatment effects in the design of policies and programs.
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| 3. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Cutthroat Capitalism versus Cuddly Socialism : Are Americans More Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking than Scandinavians?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Political Economy. - : University of Chicago Press. - 0022-3808 .- 1537-534X. ; 128:5, s. 1753-1788
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are striking differences in inequality and redistribution between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there are corresponding differences in social preferences, we conducted a large-scale international social preference experiment where Americans and Norwegians make distributive choices in identical environments. Combining the infrastructure of an international online labor market and that of a leading international data collection agency, we show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. We also provide causal evidence suggesting that fairness considerations are more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations.
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| 4. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Fairness and family background
- 2017
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Ingår i: Politics, Philosophy and Economics. - 1470-594X .- 1741-3060. ; 16:2, s. 117-131
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Fairness preferences fundamentally affect individual behavior and play an important role in shaping social and political institutions. However, people differ both with respect to what they view as fair and with respect to how much weight they attach to fairness considerations. In this article, we study the role of family background in explaining these heterogeneities in fairness preferences. In particular, we examine how socioeconomic background relates to fairness views and to how people make trade-offs between fairness and self-interest. To study this, we conducted an economic experiment with a representative sample of 14- to 15-year-old and matched the experimental data to administrative data on parental income and education. The participants made two distributive choices in the experiment. The first choice was to distribute money between themselves and another participant in a situation where there was no difference in merit. The second choice was to distribute money between two other participants with unequal merits. Our main finding is that there is a systematic difference in fairness view between children from low-socioceconomic status (SES) families and the rest of the participants; more than 50 percent of the participants from low-SES families are egalitarians, whereas only about 20 percent in the rest of the sample hold this fairness view. In contrast, we find no significant difference in the weight attached to fairness between children from different socioeconomic groups.
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| 5. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Global evidence on the selfish rich inequality hypothesis
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 119:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We report on a study of whether people believe that the rich are richer than the poor because they have been more selfish in life, using data from more than 26,000 individuals in 60 countries. The findings show a strong belief in the selfish rich inequality hypothesis at the global level; in the majority of countries, the mode is to strongly agree with it. However, we also identify important between- and within-country variation. We find that the belief in selfish rich inequality is much stronger in countries with extensive corruption and weak institutions and less strong among people who are higher in the income distribution in their society. Finally, we show that the belief in selfish rich inequality is predictive of people’s policy views on inequality and redistribution: It is significantly positively associated with agreeing that inequality in their country is unfair, and it is significantly positively associated with agreeing that the government should aim to reduce inequality. These relationships are highly significant both across and within countries and robust to including country-level or individual-level controls and using Lasso-selected regressors. Thus, the data provide compelling evidence of people believing that the rich are richer because they have been more selfish in life and perceiving selfish behavior as creating unfair inequality and justifying equalizing policies.
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| 6. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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Rettferdig ulikhet
- 2015
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Ingår i: Magma - Tidsskrift for økonomi og ledelse. - 1500-0788 .- 1500-6069. ; 6, s. 38-43
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 7. |
- Almås, Ingvild, et al.
(författare)
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What Explains the Gender Gap in College Track Dropout? Experimental and Administrative Evidence
- 2016
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Ingår i: The American Economic Review. - : American Economic Association. - 0002-8282 .- 1944-7981. ; 106:5, s. 296-302
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We exploit a unique data set, combining rich experimental data with high-quality administrative data, to study dropout from the college track in Norway, and why boys are more likely to drop out. The paper provides three main findings. First, we show that family background and personal characteristics contribute to explain dropout. Second, we show that the gender difference in dropout rates appears both when the adolescents select into the college track and after they have started. Third, we show that different processes guide the choices of the boys and the girls of whether to drop out from the college track.
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| 8. |
- Cappelen, Alexander, et al.
(författare)
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Understanding the resource curse : A large-scale experiment on corruption in Tanzania
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. - : Elsevier. - 1879-1751 .- 0167-2681. ; 183, s. 129-157
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Corruption is considered an important driver of the resource curse in developing countries. Based on a large-scale field experiment in Tanzania, this paper studies how the salience of future natural resource revenues shapes beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. We find some evidence that information about the discovery of natural gas causes people to expect more corruption in the future, but no evidence of the information making people at present more willing to engage in corruption and dishonest behavior or less trusting. The findings do not support the idea of self-fulfilling expectations about future corruption. The paper provides a rich set of results on the determinants of corruption and trust in a development context, which may contribute to a better understanding of the micro-foundations of the resource curse.
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| 9. |
- Cappelen, Alexander W., et al.
(författare)
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Fairness is intuitive
- 2016
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Ingår i: Experimental Economics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1573-6938 .- 1386-4157. ; 19:4, s. 727-740
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust to controls that take account of the fact that response time might be affected by the decision-maker’s cognitive ability and swiftness. The experiment was conducted with a large and heterogeneous sample recruited from the general population in Denmark. We find a striking similarity in the association between response time and fair behavior across groups in the society, which suggests that the predisposition to act fairly is a general human trait.
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