Discussion Paper No. 149
November 8, 2021
Do Party Positions Affect the Public's Policy Preferences?
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The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform randomized treatment groups about the positions of political parties on two family policies, child care subsidy and universal student aid. In both experiments, results show that the treatment aligns the preferences of specific partisan groups with their preferred party's position on the policy under consideration, implying endogeneity of policy preferences. The information treatment also affects non-partisan swing voters.
Keywords:
political parties; partisanship; survey experiment; information; endogenous preferences; voters; family policy;
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Discussion Paper No. 148
Peer Effects of Ambition
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Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves a performance goal for a task they have to work on. The goal is associated with a proportional bonus that is added to a piece rate if the goal is reached. In the second case, they choose the complexity of the task, which is positively associated with the piece rate compensation and effort. In both cases we test whether observing peer choices influences own choices. We find strong evidence of peer effects on performance goals. In contrast, we find no support for peer effects on the choice of task complexity.
Keywords:
peer effects; ambition; goal setting; task difficulty; laboratory experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 146
Incentives, Search Engines, and the Elicitation of Subjective Beliefs: Evidence from Representative Online Survey Experiments
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A large literature studies subjective beliefs about economic facts using unincentivized survey questions. We devise randomized experiments in a representative online survey to investigate whether incentivizing belief accuracy affects stated beliefs about average earnings by professional degree and average public school spending. Incentive provision does not impact earnings beliefs, but improves school-spending beliefs. Response patterns suggest that the latter effect likely reflects increased online-search activity. Consistently, an experiment that just encourages search-engine usage produces very similar results. Another experiment provides no evidence of experimenter-demand effects. Overall, results suggest that incentive provision does not reduce bias in our survey-based belief measures.
Keywords:
beliefs; incentives; online search; survey experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 145
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. 128
Obstacles to Efficient Allocations of Public Education Spending
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Economic research suggests that investments in early education are generally more successful than investments at later ages. This paper presents a representative survey experiment on education spending in Germany, which exhibits low relative public spending on early education. Results are consistent with a model of misconceptions: informing randomly selected respondents about benefits of early education spending shifts majority support for public spending increases from later education levels to spending on early and primary education. Effects of information provision persist over a two-week period in a follow-up survey. By contrast, results do not suggest self-interested groups inefficiently allocate public education spending.
Keywords:
misconceptions; public spending; education spending; information; survey experiment;
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Discussion Paper No. 122
Testing
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We investigate the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. Our dataset covers over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate assessment reforms over time, taking out country and year fixed effects. The expansion of standardized external comparisons, both school-based and student-based, is associated with improvements in student achievement. The effect of school-based comparison is stronger in low-performing countries. By contrast, solely internal testing without external comparison and internal teacher monitoring including inspectorates do not affect student achievement.
Keywords:
student assessment; testing; accountability; student achievement; international; pisa;
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Discussion Paper No. 117
November 5, 2021
Can Online Surveys Represent the Entire Population?
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A general concern with the representativeness of online surveys is that they exclude the "offline" population that does not use the internet. We run a large-scale opinion survey with (1) onliners in web mode, (2) offliners in face-to-face mode, and (3) onliners in face-to-face mode. We find marked response differences between onliners and offliners in the mixed-mode setting (1 vs. 2). Response differences between onliners and offliners in the same face-to-face mode (2 vs. 3) disappear when controlling for background characteristics, indicating mode effects rather than unobserved population differences. Differences in background characteristics of onliners in the two modes (1 vs. 3) indicate that mode effects partly reflect sampling differences. In our setting, re-weighting online-survey observations appears a pragmatic solution when aiming at representativeness for the entire population.
Keywords:
online survey; representativeness; mode effects; offliner; public opinion;
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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. 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. 104
Growing Up in Ethnic Enclaves: Language Proficiency and Educational Attainment of Immigrant Children
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Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in a model with region and ethnicity fixed effects. Our results indicate that exposure to a higher own-ethnic concentration impairs immigrant children's host-country language proficiency and increases school dropout. A key mediating factor for this effect is parents' lower speaking proficiency in the host-country language, whereas inter-ethnic contacts with natives and economic conditions do not play a role.
Keywords:
immigrant children; ethnic concentration; language; education; guest workers;
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