Discussion Paper No. 236
November 9, 2021
Politically Feasible Reforms of Non-Linear Tax System
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We study reforms of non-linear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirical analysis of tax reforms, with a focus on the US. We show that past reforms have, by and large, been monotonic. We also show that support by the median voter was aligned with majority support in the population. Finally, we develop sufficient statistics that enable to test whether a given tax system admits a politically feasible reform.
Keywords:
non-linear income taxation; tax reforms; political economy; optimal taxation;
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Discussion Paper No. 235
Inducing Cooperation with Emotion - Who Is Affected?
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We study the effects of dual processing differences that arise from the state level (through experimental manipulation of the decision mode), the trait level (using individual difference measures of the decision mode), and their interaction on cooperative behavior. In a survey experiment with a representative sample of the Swedish population (N = 1,828), we elicited the individuals’ primary decision mode and experimentally varied whether individuals could rely on their preferred mode or were induced to rely either on emotion or reason. Cooperation was measured across a series of commonly used and incentivized games (prisoner’s dilemma game, public goods game, trust game, dictator game). At the state level, our results show that average cooperation rates increased when emotions were induced rather than reason. At the trait level, our results show that individual decision modes and cooperation rates were not correlated when subjects could rely on their primary mode, but traits interacted with our processing manipulation: Experimentally inducing emotions increased cooperation among individuals who otherwise rely primarily on reason, but not among individuals who already rely primarily on emotion. These findings suggest that individuals integrate their traits with emotion-based states by substituting their trait rather than enhancing it. Thus, who is affected by emotions in their decision to cooperate crucially depends on state-trait interactions at the point of decision.
Keywords:
cooperation; intuition; emotion; reason; experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 234
Do Legal Standards Affect Ethical Concerns of Consumers?
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To address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the example of minimum wages. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms set prices and wages, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. We find that the majority of consumers occasionally deviate from their self-interest and that markets with such consumers exhibit substantially higher wages. Consumers implement fair allocations using two distinct strategies: they split their demand equally between firms, or they buy all units from the firm with the higher price and higher wage. The two strategies can be captured by maximin preferences and indirect reciprocity in Charness and Rabin’s (2002) reciprocal fairness model. Introducing a minimum wage in a market raises average wages despite its significant crowding out effects on consumers’ fairness concerns. Abolishing a minimum wage crowds in consumer fairness concerns, but crowding in is not sufficient to avoid overall negative effects on workers’ wages.
Keywords:
fairness; consumer behavior; minimum wage; crowding out; experimental economics;
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Discussion Paper No. 233
Cooperation in a Company: A Large-Scale Experiment
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We analyze cooperation within a company setting in order to study the relationship between cooperative attitudes and financial as well as non-financial rewards. In total, 910 employees of a large software company participate in an incentivized online experiment. We observe high levels of cooperation and the typical conditional contribution patterns in a modified public goods game. When linking experiment and company record data, we observe that cooperative attitudes of employees do not pay off in terms of financial rewards within the company. Rather, cooperative employees receive non-financial benefits such as recognition or friendship as the main reward medium. In contrast to most studies in the experimental laboratory, sustained levels of cooperation in our company setting relate to non-financial values of cooperation rather than solely to financial incentives.
Keywords:
cooperation; social dilemma; field experiment; company;
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Discussion Paper No. 232
Measuring Unfair Inequality: Reconciling Equality of Opportunity and Freedom from Poverty
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Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative preferences. In this paper we address this shortcoming by developing a new measure of unfair inequality that reconciles two widely-held fairness principles: equality of opportunity and freedom from poverty. We provide two empirical applications of our measure. First, we analyze the development of inequality in the US from 1969 to 2014 from a normative perspective. Second, we conduct a corresponding international comparison between the US and 31 European countries in 2010. Our results document increasing unfairness in the US over time. This trend is driven by a strong decrease in social mobility that puts the “land of opportunity” among the most unfair countries in 2010.
Keywords:
inequality; equality of opportunity; poverty; fairness; measurement;
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Discussion Paper No. 231
The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism
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German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender roles.
Keywords:
political systems; communism; preferences; culture; Germany;
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Discussion Paper No. 230
Repeated Games with Endogenous Discounting
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In a symmetric repeated game with standard preferences, there are no gains from intertemporal trade. In fact, under a suitable normalization of utility, the payoff set in the repeated game is identical to that in the stage game. We show that this conclusion may no longer be true if preferences are recursive and stationary, but not time separable. If so, the players’ rates of time preference are no longer fixed, but may vary endogenously, depending on what transpires in the course of the game. This creates opportunities for intertemporal trade, giving rise to new and interesting dynamics. For example, the efficient and symmetric outcome of a repeated prisoner’s dilemma may be to take turns defecting, even though the efficient and symmetric outcome of the stage game is to cooperate. A folk theorem shows that such dynamics can be sustained in equilibrium if the players are sufficiently patient.
Keywords:
repeated games; efficiency; folk theorems; endogenous discounting;
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Discussion Paper No. 229
The Transmission of Sectoral Shocks Across the Innovation Network
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Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper we use a firm-level panel of 13 European countries to assess whether an industry-specific policy propagates across the network of innovating firms through technological linkages. Following the competition shock to the European textile sector, triggered by the 2001 removal of import quotas on Chinese textiles, we find that patenting and knowledge sourcing behavior of non-textile firms are negatively affected. At the aggregate regional level, this indirect effect on non-textile firms can be around three to five times larger than the direct effect.
Keywords:
technological linkages; spillovers; patents; knowledge sourcing; industrial policy;
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Discussion Paper No. 228
Behavior-Based Price Discrimination under Endogenous Privacy
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This paper analyzes consumers’ privacy choice concerning their private data and firms’ ensuing pricing strategy. The General Data Protection Regulation passed by the European Union in May 2018 allows consumers to decide whether to reveal private information in the form of cookies to an online seller. By incorporating this endogenous decision into a duopoly model with behavior-based pricing, we find two contrasting equilibria. Under revelation to both firms, consumers disclose their information. Under revelation to only one firm, consumers hide their information. Based on the model, we design a laboratory experiment. We find that there is a large share of consumers who reveal their private data. Particularly, less privacy-concerned subjects and subjects in the setting where only one firm receives information are more likely to reveal information.
Keywords:
behavior-based pricing; privacy; laboratory experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 226
From Friends to Foes: National Identity and Collaboration in Diverse Teams
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This project studies collaboration in highly skilled, nationally diverse teams. An unexpected international political conflict makes national diversity more salient among existing and potential team members. I exploit this natural experiment to quantify the role of social, identity-driven, costs for performance and formation of diverse teams. Using microdata from GitHub, the world’s largest hosting platform for software projects, I estimate the causal impacts of a political conflict that burst out between Russia and Ukraine in 2014. I find that the conflict strongly reduced online cooperation between Russian and Ukrainian programmers. The conflict lowered the likelihood that Ukrainian and Russian programmers work in the same team and led to the performance decline of existing joint projects. I provide evidence that the observed effects were not driven by economic considerations. Rather, the conflict activated national identities and shifted programmers’ taste for teammates and projects. My results highlight the role of identity-driven concerns that can distort existing and prevent future collaborations, otherwise profitable from an economic perspective.
Keywords:
teams; diversity; conflict; national identity; open source;
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