Discussion Paper No. 145
November 8, 2021
The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance: How Information and Design Affect Public Preferences for Tuition
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Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N > 19,500). The electorate is divided, with a slight plurality opposing tuition. Providing information on the university earnings premium raises support for tuition by 7 percentage points, turning the plurality in favor. The opposition-reducing effect persists two weeks after treatment. Information on fiscal costs and unequal access does not affect public preferences. Designing tuition as deferred income-contingent payments raises support by 16 percentage points, creating a strong majority favoring tuition. The same effect emerges when framed as loan payments. Support decreases with higher tuition levels and increases when targeted at non-EU students.
Keywords:
tuition; higher education; political economy; survey experiments; information; earnings premium; income-contingent loans; voting;
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Discussion Paper No. 144
Job Creation in Tight and Slack Labor Markets
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Do investment programs create more jobs in tight or in slack labor markets? We study this question using data from a large, long-term photovoltaic investment scheme in Germany. Comparing counties with high and low unemployment both over time and across space, we find that photovoltaic installations created at least twice as many jobs in slack than in tight labor markets. Our results suggest that the differences in job-creation are not driven by changes in the composition or prices of investment, capital-labor substitution, or regional migration. This leaves crowding-out as the most plausible mechanism.
Keywords:
local employment multiplier; state-dependent multiplier;
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Discussion Paper No. 140
On Factors of Consumer Heterogeneity in (Mis)Valuation of Future Energy Costs: Evidence for the German Automobile Market
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In this paper, we first recover the individual valuation of expected future fuel costs at the time of a car purchase and then explore how various factors relate to the recovered consumer undervaluation of fuel savings (on average, consumers' willingness-to-pay for a €1 reduction in fuel costs is below €0.20).
Keywords:
energy-efficient paradox; hedonic discrete choice model; vehicle purchase; willingness-to-pay;
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Discussion Paper No. 142
Equilibria Under Knightian Price Uncertainty
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We study economies in which agents face Knightian uncertainty about state prices. Knightian uncertainty leads naturally to nonlinear expectations. We introduce a corresponding equilibrium concept with sublinear prices and prove that equilibria exist under weak conditions. In general, such equilibria lead to Pareto inefficient allocations; the equilibria coincide with Arrow-Debreu equilibria only if the values of net trades are ambiguity-free in the mean. In economies without aggregate uncertainty, inefficiencies are generic. We introduce a constrained efficiency concept, uncertainty-neutral efficiency, equilibrium allocations under price uncertainty are efficient in this constrained sense. Arrow-Debreu equilibria turn out to be non-robust with respect to the introduction of Knightian uncertainty.
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Discussion Paper No. 139
Learning About One's Self
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How can naivete about present bias persist despite experience? To answer this question, our experiment investigates participants' ability to learn from their own behavior. Participants decide how much to work on a real effort task on two predetermined dates. In the week preceding each work date, they state their commitment preferences and predictions of future effort. While we find that participants are present biased and initially naive about their bias, our methodology enables us to establish that they are Bayesian in how they learn from their experience at the first work date. A treatment in which we vary the nature of the task at the second date further shows that learning is unencumbered by a change in environment. Our results suggest that persistent naivete cannot be explained by a fundamental inferential bias. At the same time, we find that participants initially underestimate the information that their experience will provide - a bias that may lead to underinvestment in experimentation and a failure to activate self-regulation mechanisms.
Keywords:
naivete; present bias; learning;
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Discussion Paper No. 138
Individual Life Horizon Influences Attitudes Toward Democracy
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Support for democracy in the population is considered critical for the emergence and stability of democracy. Macro-determinants and retrospective experiences have been shown to affect the support for democracy at the individual level. We investigate whether and how the individual life horizon, in terms of the prospective length of life and age, affect individual attitudes toward democracy. Combining information from period life tables with individual survey response data spanning more than 260,000 observations from 93 countries over the period 1994-2014, we find evidence that the expected remaining years of life influence the attitudes toward a democratic political regime. The statistical identification decomposes the influence of age from the influence of the expected proximity to death. The evidence shows that support for democracy increases with age, but declines with expected proximity to death, implying that increasing longevity might help fostering the support for democracy. Increasing age while keeping the remaining years of life fixed as well as increasing remaining years of life for a given age group both contribute to the support for democracy.
Keywords:
attitudes toward democracy; life expectancy; aging;
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Discussion Paper No. 137
Weak Markets, Strong Teachers: Recession at Career Start and Teacher Effectiveness
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How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher quality with value-added measures of impacts on student test scores, using administrative data on over 30,000 teachers in Florida public schools. Consistent with a Roy model of occupational choice, teachers entering the profession during recessions are significantly more effective in raising student test scores. Results are supported by robustness tests and unlikely to be driven by differential attrition.
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Discussion Paper No. 136
Disclosure and Subsequent Innovation: Evidence from the Patent Depository Library Program
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How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? To answer this question, we examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Before the Internet, patent libraries gave inventors access to patent documents. We find that after patent library opening, local patenting increases by 17% relative to control regions. Additional analyses suggest that the disclosure of technical information is the mechanism underlying this effect: inventors start to cite more distant prior art and the effect ceases after the introduction of the Internet. Our analyses thus provide evidence that disclosure plays an important role in cumulative innovation.
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Discussion Paper No. 135
Sunspots in Global Games: Theory and Experiment
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We solve and test experimentally a global-games model of speculative attacks where agents can choose whether to read, at a cost, a payoff irrelevant (sunspot) announcement. Assuming that subjects exogenously believe some others to follow sunspots, we provide conditions for a unique equilibrium where agents follow a sunspot announcement depending on the realization of an informative private signal. Although most groups converge to classical global-game strategies that neglect sunspots, we find that about one-third of groups are eventually coordinating on sunspots, which is inconsistent with the standard theory. In line with the assumption of subjects expecting others to follow sunspots, subjects overestimate the number of subjects who follow sunspots by about 100% on average. We conclude that in environments with high strategic uncertainty, payoff irrelevant signals can affect behavior even if they are costly to obtain and not expected to be publicly observed.
Keywords:
creditor coordination; global games speculative attack; sunspots;
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Discussion Paper No. 134
Competition and Fatigue at Work
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We study theoretically and experimentally the role of fatigue and recovery within a competitive work environment. At work, agents usually make their effort choice in response to competition and monetary incentives. At the same time, they have to take into account fatigue, which accumulates over time if there is insufficient recovery. We model a sequence of work periods as tournaments that are linked through fatigue spillovers, inducing a non-time-separable decision problem. We also allow for variations in incentives in one work period, in order to analyze spillover effects to the work periods "before" and "after". Making recovery harder should, generally, reduce effort. This theoretical prediction is supported by the experimental data. A short-term increase in incentives in one period should lead to higher effort in that period, and, due to fatigue, to strategic resting before and after. Our experimental results confirm the former, whereas we do not find sufficient evidence for the latter. Even in the presence of fatigue, total effort should positively respond to higher-powered incentives. This is not supported by our data. Removing fatigue, we find the expected increase in total effort. For work environments, this may imply that the link between monetary incentives and effort provision becomes weaker in the presence of fatigue or insufficient recovery between work periods.
Keywords:
fatigue; recovery; incentives; experiment; tournament;
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