Discussion Paper No. 513
October 16, 2024
Predictive Power of Biological Sex and Gender Identity on Economic Behavior
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Abstract:
Behavioral differences by biological sex are still not fully understood, suggesting that studying gender differences in behavioral traits through the lenses of continuous identity might be a promising avenue to understand the remaining observed gender gaps. Using a large U.S. online sample (N=2017) and machine learning, we develop and validate a new continuous gender identity measure consisting of separate femininity and masculinity scores. In a first study, we identify ninety attributes from prior research and conduct an experiment to classify them as feminine and masculine. In a subsequent study, a different group of participants completes tasks designed to elicit behavioral traits that have been previously documented in the behavioral economics literature to exhibit binary gender differences. Data for the second study are collected in two waves; the first wave serves as a training sample, allowing us to identify key attributes predicting behavioral traits, create candidate identity measures, and select the most effective one, comprising sixteen attributes, based on predictive power. Finally, we use the second wave (test sample) to validate our gender identity measure, which outperforms existing ones in explaining gender differences in economic decision-making. We show that confidence, competition, and risk are associated with masculinity, while altruism, equality, and efficiency are with femininity, providing new possibilities for targeted policymaking.
Keywords:
biological sex; gender identity; machine learning; online experiment;
JEL-Classification:
D91; J16; J62; C91;
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Discussion Paper No. 491
January 30, 2024
The Formation of Subjective House Price Expectations
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Abstract:
Subjective house price expectations drive individual housing choices and market dynamics. We study the formation of subjective expectations about local house prices using novel survey data from Britain, a country with high homeownership rates and widely varying local housing dynamics. There is a substantial and heterogeneous perception gap and individuals extrapolate strongly from perceived but not from realized past price changes. In addition, expectations are predicted by wider, easily observable measures of local economic conditions, especially among individuals with low financial sophistication. Individuals residing in local housing markets where past prices are less informative or less observable rely more strongly on local economic conditions in their belief formation. Our results emphasize the role of heterogeneity in expectations formation processes, and their underlying information set.
Keywords:
subjective expectations; housing markets; local economic conditions;
JEL-Classification:
D12; D84;
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Discussion Paper No. 484
December 20, 2023
Minority Protection in Voting Mechanisms – Experimental Evidence
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Abstract:
Under simple majority voting an absolute majority of voters may choose policies that are harmful to minorities. It is the purpose of sub- and super-majority rules to protect legitimate minority interests. We study how voting rules are chosen under the veil of ignorance and whether there are systematic biases in these choices. In our experiment, individuals choose voting rules for given distributions of gains and losses that can arise from a policy, but before learning their own valuation of the policy. We find that subjects on average adjust the voting rule in line with the skewness of the distribution. As a result, a higher share of the achievable surplus can be extracted with the suggested rules than with exogenously given simple majority voting. While the rule choices are not significantly biased towards under- or overprotection of the minority, towards majority voting or towards status-quo preserving rules, they only imperfectly reflect the distributions of benefits and costs. In expectation this leads to only 63% of the surplus being extracted. The participants are heterogeneous with respect to how well their rule choices adapt to the distribution of valuations, with a large share of the surplus loss caused by a small group of participants.
Keywords:
minority protection; voting; experiments;
JEL-Classification:
D72; C91;
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Discussion Paper No. 483
Are Women in Science Less Ambitious than Men? Experimental Evidence on the Role of Gender and STEM in Promotion Applications
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Abstract:
The gender wage gap is to a significant extent driven by gender-based job segregation. One of the potential culprits can be found in supply-side behavioral differences in promotion applications. In this study, using a controlled lab experiment, we disentangle the roles of gender, field of study, and task difficulty in promotion application decisions. Our study pro- vides three crucial findings. First, gender differences in self-limiting promotion application behavior are only present in STEM field students when exposed to a male task. Specifi- cally, when an easier alternative is available, women are less willing to apply for promotions concerning harder tasks than men. Second, there exists no significant difference between men’s and women’s willingness to apply for promotion concerning female jobs in STEM or non-STEM fields. Third, we find that previously reported gender differences in confidence are present only between STEM field students. The results also suggest that self-sorting into positions does not cause a decrease in overall welfare, however, it causes fewer promotions for women in STEM. We finally propose an easy-to-implement policy intervention to close the gender gap in STEM students when applying for a promotion.
Keywords:
gender differences; promotion application; self-limiting behavior; hierarchical segregation; STEM; male task; experiment;
JEL-Classification:
D91; J16; J62; C91;
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Discussion Paper No. 469
December 9, 2023
Narrative Persuasion
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Abstract:
Modern life offers nearly unbridled access to information; it is the harnessing of this information to guide decision-making that presents a challenge. We study how one individual may try to shape the way another person interprets objective information by proposing a causal explanation (or narrative) that makes sense of this objective information. Using an experiment, we examine the use of narratives as a persuasive tool in the context of financial advice where advisors may hold incentives that differ from those of the individuals they are advising. Our results reveal several insights about the underlying mechanisms that govern narrative persuasion. First, we show that advisors construct self-interested narratives and make them persuasive by tailoring them to fit the objective information. Second, we demonstrate that advisors are able to shift investors’ beliefs about the future performance of a company. Third, we identify the types of narratives that investors find convincing, namely those that fit the objective information well. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy of several potential policy interventions aimed at protecting investors. We find that narrative persuasion is difficult to protect against.
Keywords:
narratives; beliefs; financial advice; conflicts of interest; behavioral finance;
JEL-Classification:
D83; G40; G50; C90;
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Discussion Paper No. 454
November 18, 2023
Decomposing Trust
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Abstract:
Trust is an important condition for economic growth and other economic outcomes. Previous studies suggest that the decision to trust is driven by a combination of risk attitudes, distributional preferences, betrayal aversion, and beliefs about the probability of being reciprocated. We compare the results of a binary trust game to the results of a series of control treatments that by design remove the effect of one or more of these components of trust. This allows us to decompose variation in trust behavior into its underlying factors. Our results imply that beliefs are a key driver of trust, and that the additional components only play a role when beliefs about reciprocity are sufficiently optimistic. Our decomposition approach can be applied to other settings where multiple factors that are not mutually independent affect behavior. We discuss its advantages over the more traditional approach of controlling for measures of relevant factors derived from separate tasks in regressions, in particular with respect to measurement error and omitted variable bias.
Keywords:
trust; omitted-variable bias; measurement error;
JEL-Classification:
C90; D90;
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Discussion Paper No. 424
September 11, 2023
Abadie's Kappa and Weighting Estimators of the Local Average Treatment Effect
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Abstract:
In this paper we study the finite sample and asymptotic properties of various weighting estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE), several of which are based on Abadie's (2003) kappa theorem. Our framework presumes a binary treatment and a binary instrument, which may only be valid after conditioning on additional covariates. We argue that one of the Abadie estimators, which is weight normalized, is preferable in many contexts. Several other estimators, which are unnormalized, do not generally satisfy the properties of scale invariance with respect to the natural logarithm and translation invariance, thereby exhibiting sensitivity to the units of measurement when estimating the LATE in logs and the centering of the outcome variable more generally. On the other hand, when noncompliance is one-sided, certain unnormalized estimators have the advantage of being based on a denominator that is bounded away from zero. To reconcile these findings, we demonstrate that when the instrument propensity score is estimated using an appropriate covariate balancing approach, the resulting normalized estimator also shares this advantage. We use a simulation study and three empirical applications to illustrate our findings. In two cases, the unnormalized estimates are clearly unreasonable, with ``incorrect'' signs, magnitudes, or both.
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JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 423
Peer Effects Heterogeneity and Social Networks in Education
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Abstract:
This study focuses on the role of heterogeneity in network peer effects by accounting for network-specific factors and different driving mechanisms of peer behavior. We propose a novel Multivariate Instrumental Variable (MVIV) estimator which is consistent for a large number of networks keeping the individual network size bounded. We apply this approach to estimate peer effects on school achievement exploiting the network structure of friendships within classrooms. The empirical evidence presented is based on a unique network dataset from German upper secondary schools. We show that accounting for heterogeneity is not only crucial from a statistical perspective, but also yields new structural insights into how class size and gender composition affect school achievement through peer behavior.
Keywords:
network heterogeneity; peer effects; multivariate instrumental variables; minimum distance estimation; school achievement;
JEL-Classification:
D85; L14; I21; C30; C36;
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Discussion Paper No. 386
February 27, 2023
Measuring Preferences Over Intertemporal Profiles
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Abstract:
Growing evidence indicates that utility over time is different from utility under risk. Hence, measuring intertemporal preferences (discounting and utility) exclusively from intertemporal choices is desirable. We develop a simple method for measuring intertemporal preferences. It is parameter-free in both discounting and utility, and allows a wider range of models to be measured than preceding methods. It is easy to implement, clear to subjects, incentive compatible, and does not require more measurements than existing methods if identical assumptions are imposed. In an experiment, we illustrate how the method can be used to test recent models with unconventional assumptions non-parametrically.
Keywords:
measuring time preferences; intertemporal profile; parameter-free;
JEL-Classification:
C91; D12; D91;
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Discussion Paper No. 381
February 8, 2023
Cognitive Ability and Perceived Disagreement in Learning
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Abstract:
Do agents believe to be agreeing more with others in the long-run? This paper designs an experiment to study how cognitive abilities affect actual and perceived disagreement in a standard sequential belief updating task with public signals. We document a persistent gap in the perception of disagreement as a function of cognitive ability. Higher cognitive ability is associated with less perceived disagreement, although the average subject underestimates the extent of actual disagreement regardless of cognitive ability. Learning about the state of the world has little effect on the evolution of perceived disagreement when controlling for cognitive ability. Providing subjects with information about their partner’s cognitive ability affects perceived disagreement only when the partner is less cognitively able.
Keywords:
cognitive ability; disagreement; learning;
JEL-Classification:
C90; D83; D89;