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Is it better to give employees gifts or cash?
at determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment and tested the extent to which cash and non-monetary gifts affect workers' productivity. Our main finding is that the nature of the gift, not its monetary value, determines the prevalence of reciprocal reactions. A gift in-kind results in a significant and substantial increase in workers' productivity. An equivalent cash gift, on the other hand, is largely ineffective or even though an additional experiment showed that workers would strongly…
1 min read
How would your life change if you suddenly got handed a lot of money?
oking at inherited wealth and lottery winnings: Your health wouldn't change much, your mental health/quality-of-life would probably improve, you'd definitely drink a lot more and maybe smoke more: We examine how wealth shocks, in the form of inheritances, affect the mortality rates, health status and health behaviors of older adults, using data from eight waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). Our main finding is that bequests do not have substantial effects on health status, although some improvements in…
2 minutes
Do people work less in the US when the World Cup is going on?
s, sometimes up to almost a half hour per week less: In this paper I explore the flexibility of the work week in the United States, using the FIFA Soccer World Cup as a natural experiment. My empirical strategy exploits the exogenous variation that arises due to which country hosts the World Cup, as this will determine the time games are broadcast across different time zones in the United States. The hour of the day when games are broadcast differentially…
2 minutes
Is power more evenly balanced in poor households?
e structure of intra-household allocation is crucial to know whether a transfer from a rich household to a poor one translates into a transfer from a rich individual to a poor one. If rich households are more unequal than poor ones, then a progressive transfer among households reduces intra-household inequality, hence inequality among individuals. More speci cally, two conditions have to be satisfied for extending Generalized Lorenz judgments from household level to individual one. The fraction of the couple's expenditures…
1 min read
Do Doctors Induce Demand?
ere exists a large variation in the provision of medical care across the U.S. In addition, the supply of medical care is positively correlated with the demand. According to a widely held view, physicians induce the demand by leveraging their superior medical knowledge. This paper examines supply induced demand in medicine using an exogenous negative income shock to obstetrics/gynecologists that was caused by a declining number of births in their practice location. The number of births in the U.S. had…
1 min read
Are happier people better citizens?
is paper presents evidence on causal influence of happiness on social capital and trust using German Socio-Economic Panel. Exploiting the unexplained cross-sectional variation in individual happiness (residuals) in 1984 to eliminate the endogeneity problem, the paper finds that happier people trust others more, and importantly, help create more social capital. Specifically, they have a higher desire to vote, perform more volunteer work, and more frequently participate in public activities. They also have a higher respect for law and order, hold…
1 min read
Does homework worsen inequality?
ing Dutch data on pupils in elementary school this paper is the first empirical study that analyzes whether assigning homework has an heterogeneous impact on pupil achievement. Addressing potential biases that arise from unobserved school quality, pupil selection by exploiting different methods, I find that the test score gap is larger in classes where everybody gets homework than in classes where nobody gets homework. More precisely pupils belonging to the upper part of the socioeconomic status scale perform better when…
1 min read
Why do we cry?
re's one theory: Emotional tears have been shown to enhance the interpretation of sadness that is inferred from facial expressions. The current paper puts emotional tears in an evolutionary context. By using biological signaling theory, it first looks at the distinction between cues and signals, both of which provide information to recipients, except that signals have evolved for that purpose. The conclusion is that a signaling function has yet to be shown. Nevertheless, as emotional tears are likely to function…
1 min read
