Discussion Paper No. 116
November 5, 2021
Who Teaches the Teachers? A RCT of Peer-to-Peer Observation and Feedback in 181 Schools
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It is well established that teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student outcomes. However, to date there is scant robust quantitative research demonstrating that teacher training programs can have lasting impacts on student test scores. To address this gap, we conduct and evaluate a teacher peer-to-peer observation and feedback program under Randomized Control Trial (RCT) conditions. Half of 181 volunteer primary schools in England were randomly selected to participate in the two year program. We find that students of treated teachers perform no better on national tests a year after the program ended. The absence of external observers and incentives in our program may explain the contrast of these results with the small body of work which shows a positive influence of teacher observation and feedback on pupil outcomes.
Keywords:
education; teachers; ret; peer mentoring;
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Discussion Paper No. 115
Seasonal Scarcity and Sharing Norms
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How does scarcity affect individual willingness to share and willingness to enforce sharing from others? Sharing in poor communities gains importance as an insurance mechanism during adverse shocks, yet shocks make it costlier to share. I conducted repeated economic experiments in both a lean and a relatively plentiful post-harvest season with the same group of Afghan subsistence farmers experiencing annual seasonal scarcities. I separate altruistic motives from enforcement effects using dictator and third party punishment games. While altruistic sharing remains temporally stable, the enforcement of sharing weakens substantially in times of scarcity. Temporal norms fluctuations seem to drive the results.
Keywords:
afghanistan; scarcity; seasonality; sharing; social norms;
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Discussion Paper No. 114
How Lotteries in School Choice Help to Level the Playing Field
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The use of lotteries is advocated to desegregate schools. We study lottery quotas embedded in the two most common school choice mechanisms, namely deferred and immediate acceptance mechanisms. Some seats are allocated based on merit (e.g., grades) and some based on lottery draws. We focus on the effect of the lottery quota on truth-telling, the utility of students, and the student composition at schools, using theory and experiments. We find that the lottery quota strengthens truth-telling in equilibrium when the deferred acceptance mechanism is used while it has no clear effect on truth-telling in equilibrium for the immediate acceptance mechanism. This finds support in the experiment. Moreover, the lottery quota leads to more diverse school populations in the experiments, as predicted. Comparing the two mechanisms, students with the lowest grades profit more from the introduction of the lottery under immediate than under deferred acceptance.
Keywords:
school choice; immediate acceptance mechanism; deferred acceptance mechanism; lotteries; experiment; market design;
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Discussion Paper No. 113
Historic Sex-Ratio Imbalances Predict Female Participation in the Market for Politicians
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We analyze the long-term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation, in particular in the market for politicians. We exploit variation in sex ratios - the number of men divided by the number of women in a region - across Germany induced by WWII. In the 1990 elections, women were more likely to run for office in constituencies that had relatively fewer men in 1946. We do not find a significant effect of the sex ratio on the likelihood of a woman winning the election. These results suggest that while women were more likely to run for a seat in parliament in constituencies with lower historical sex ratios, voters were not more inclined to vote for them. Voter demand effects thus do not appear to be as strong as candidate supply effects.
Keywords:
female politicians; gender stereotypes; occupational choice; sex imbalance;
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Discussion Paper No. 112
Social Image Concerns and Welfare Take-Up
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Using a laboratory experiment, we present first evidence that social image concerns causally reduce the take-up of an individually beneficial transfer. Our design manipulates the informativeness of the take-up decision by varying whether transfer eligibility is based on ability or luck, and how the transfer is financed. We find that subjects avoid the inference both of being low-skilled (ability stigma) and of being willing to live off others (free-rider stigma). Using a placebo treatment, we exclude other explanations for the observed stigma effects. Although stigma reduces take-up, elicitation of political preferences reveals that only a minority of "taxpayers" vote for the public transfer.
Keywords:
stigma; signaling; redistribution; non take-up; welfare program;
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Discussion Paper No. 111
Inferring Attribute Non-Attendance Using Eye-Tracking in Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis
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Traditionally, the choice-based conjoint analysis relies on the assumption of rational decision makers that use all available information. However, several studies suggest that people ignore some information when making choices. In this paper, we build upon recent developments in the choice literature and employ a latent class model that simultaneously allows for attribute non-attendance (ANA) and preference heterogeneity. In addition, we relate visual attention derived from eye tracking to the probability of ANA to test, understand, and validate ANA in a marketing context. In two empirical applications, we find that a) our proposed model fits the data best, b) the majority of respondents indeed ignores some attributes, which has implications for willingness-to-pay estimates, segmentation, and targeting, and c) even though the latent class model identifies ANA well without eye tracking information, our model with visual attention helps to better understand ANA by also accounting for differences in attribute processing patterns.
Keywords:
attribute non-attendance; eye tracking; discrete choice modeling; choice-based conjoint analysis;
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Discussion Paper No. 110
Educational Inequality and Public Policy Preferences: Evidence from Representative Survey Experiments
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To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational inequality but only slightly affects support for equity-oriented education policies, which is generally high. The small treatment effects are not due to respondents' failure to connect policies with educational inequality or aversion against government interventions. Support for compulsory preschool is the one policy with a strong positive information treatment effect, which is increased further by informing about policy effectiveness.
Keywords:
inequality; education; information; survey experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 109
Consumer Exploitation and Notice Periods
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Firms often set long notice periods when consumers cancel a contract, and sometimes do so even when the costs of changing or canceling the contract are small. We investigate a model in which a firm offers a contract to consumers who may procrastinate canceling it due to naive present-bias. We show that the firm may set a long notice period to exploit naive consumers.
Keywords:
notice periods; procrastination; present bias; time inconsistency; consumer naivete;
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Discussion Paper No. 108
Effects of Poverty on Impatience
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We study two psychological channels how poverty may increase impatient behavior -- an effect on time preference and reduced attention. We measured discount rates among Ugandan farmers who made decisions about when to enjoy entertainment instead of working. We find that experimentally induced thoughts about poverty-related problems increase the preference to consume entertainment early and delay work. The effect is equivalent to a 27 p.p. increase in the intertemporal rate of substitution. Using monitoring tools similar to eye tracking, a novel feature for this subject pool, we show this effect is not due to a lower ability to sustain attention.
Keywords:
poverty; scarcity; time discounting; inattention; decision-making process; preferences;
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Discussion Paper No. 107
Sanctioning and Trustworthiness Across Ethnic Groups
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We show how sanctioning is more effective in increasing cooperation between groups than within groups. We study this using a trust game among ethnically diverse subjects in Afghanistan. In the experiment, we manipulate i) sanctioning and ii) ethnic identity. We find that sanctioning increases trustworthiness in cross-ethnic interactions, but not when applied by a co-ethnic. While we find higher in-group trustworthiness in the absence of sanctioning, the availability and use of the sanction closes this gap. This has important implications for understanding the effect of institutions in developing societies where ethnic identity is salient. Our results suggest that formal institutions for enforcing cooperation are more effective when applied between, rather than within, ethnic groups, due to behavioral differences in how individuals respond to sanctions.
Keywords:
sanctions; cooperation; crowding out; moral incentives; ethnicity; afghanistan;
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