1,721,032 research outputs found
Exports and wages: rent sharing, workforce composition, or returns to skills?
Full text linkWe use linked employer-employee data from Italy to explore the
relationship between exports and wages. Exploiting the 1992 devaluation of the lira, we show that exporting firms both pay a wage
premium above what their workers would earn in the outside labor
market (the “rent-sharing” effect) and employ workers whose skills
command a higher price after the devaluation (the “skill composition” effect). The latter only emerges once we allow for the value
of workers’ skills to differ in the pre- and post-devaluation periods.
We also document that the export wage premium is larger for workers with more export-related experience
Moral NIMBY-ism? Understanding Societal Support for Monetary Compensation to Plasma Donors in Canada
No full textThe growing demand for plasma, especially for the manufacture of therapeutic products, prompts discussions on the merits of different procurement systems. We conducted a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of 826 Canadian residents to assess attitudes toward legalizing payments to plasma donors, a practice that is illegal in several Canadian provinces. We found no evidence of widespread societal opposition to payments to plasma donors. On the contrary, over 70% of respondents reported that they would support compensation.Our Canadian respondents were more in favor of paying plasma donors elsewhere than in Canada, but the differences were small, suggesting a weak role for moral "NIMBY-ism" or relativism. Moral concerns were the respondents' main reason for opposing payments, together with concerns for the safety of plasma from compensated donors, although most of the plasma in Canada does come from paid U.S. donors. Among those in favor of legalizing payments to donors, the main rationale was to guarantee a higher domestic supply. Finally, roughly half of those who declared to be against payments reported that they would reconsider their position if domestic supply plus imports did not cover domestic demand. Most Canadians, therefore, seem to espouse a consequentialist view on issues related to the procurement of plasma
Do unemployment benefits promote or hinder job reallocation?
No full textAccording to recent and largely untested theories, unemployment benefits (UBs) could improve the extent and quality of job reallocation even at the cost of increasing unemployment. In this paper, we use a new set of yearly panel data from a large number of countries to evaluate empirically the relationship between unemployment benefits and job reallocation. Unlike previous work assessing the effects of UBs on labor market stocks, we focus on flows and rely on policy "experiments," notably the introduction from scratch of unemployment benefits in many countries. We exploit the longitudinal nature of our data to lessen the potentially important selection, endogeneity, and omitted variable problems. We find a positive, sizable, and significant effect of the introduction of UBs on job reallocation, arising mainly from the job destruction margin although this effect fades away over time. These findings appear to be robust to changes in the countries in the sample, control variables or estimation methods. We discuss to what extent our results are consistent with equilibrium matching models with or without endogenous sorting of workers into jobs providing entitlement to UBs and stochastic job matching. © 2009 Elsevier B.V
Social economics: current and emerging avenues
No full textThe separation of economics and sociology as distinct disciplines can be traced back to at least the so-called “ordinal revolution” (Pareto 1900, 1909) and the subsequent development of ‘marginalism’ and modern economics. Pareto’s division between ‘political economy’ (as the science of the economic system driven by rational factors like interests and appetites) and ‘sociology’ (or the science of the sociological system determined by ‘irrational’ forces such as sentiments/residues and derivations) had a profound and lasting influence on both disciplines. In spite of the separation and the different methodological approaches, the conversation and cross-pollination between economics and sociology never stopped, and has been often fruitful. Major early examples include Veblen’s study of institutions and of the interaction of economic changes and cultural and social changes (Veblen, 1899), Polanyi’s “embeddedness” argument and the idea that non-economic factors (e.g., social conventions) act as constraints on people’s economic behavior. More generally, the interactions between economics and other disciplines (e.g., psychology) have been more intense than it might seem at first sight. For instance, Herbert Simon’s idea that human choice is often best explained as being the result of “satisficing” as opposed to “maximizing” behavior (Simon 1955, 1956, 1957) is today a central tenet of behavioral economics, which, it can be argued, has obtained mainstream status
Paid vs. Volunteer Donations: An Analysis of the Behavioral and Ethical Issuesm Around Donor Incentives
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Increasing Blood and Plasma Donations: Behavioral Ethical Scalability
No full textBlood banks around the world often struggle to collect sufficient quantities of blood, plasma and other blood components to meet the needs of the large and growing number of patients who rely on transfusions and blood-derived therapies for their survival. Several blood collection organizations have explored the use of both behavioral nudges and economic incentives, with varying degrees of success. Economic incentives are often perceived as being in conflict with the core mission of blood banks, with donors’ altruistic motivation, and more generally, with moral values. Research, however, shows that properly designed economic incentives do boost donations. In some countries, moreover, paying donors is legal. In the United States, for example, plasma donors receive financial compensation, and the plasma industry is a thriving business that results in 70% of the world supply of plasma-derived therapies. In fact, millions of patients in countries that do not allow payment to plasma donors rely on imports of life-saving, plasma-derived medicinal products from the US. In this chapter, we begin by describing the unique features of the “market” for blood and blood components, emphasizing the mix of moral and material motivations that typically characterizes donors, and the mission-driven nature of blood-collecting organizations. Next, we report findings from empirical research that studied the impact of behavioral nudges and economic incentives provided to blood and plasma donors, with focus on the effects of these interventions on the quantity and quality of collections as well as on donor motivation. By comparing and contrasting donations of whole blood for transfusion (a largely altruistic system chronically affected by shortages) with donations of plasma for the production of medical therapies (a large-scale business that reliably supplies millions of patients around the world), we discuss the tradeoffs that societies face when deciding how to organize the procurement of blood and plasma. Similar to chapter 13 on healthy eating nudges, we also discuss the importance of assessing the public’s opinion as an input into the legislative and regulatory deliberations, particularly concerning the role of and limits to market-based incentives and mechanisms
Is the Price Right? The Role of Economic Tradeoffs in Explaining Reactions to Price Surges
No full textPublic authorities often introduce price controls following price surges, potentially causing inefficiencies and exacerbating shortages. A survey experiment with 7,612 Canadian and U.S. respondents shows that unregulated price surges raise moral objections and widespread disapproval. However, acceptance increases and demand for regulation declines when participants are prompted to consider economic trade-offs between controlled and unregulated prices, whereby incentives from higher prices lead to additional supply and enhance access to goods. Moreover, highlighting these trade-offs reduces polarization in moral judgments between supporters and opponents of unregulated pricing. Textual analysis of responses to open-ended questions provides further insights into our findings, and an incentivized donation task demonstrates consistency between stated preferences and real-stakes behavior. Although economic trade-offs do influence public support for price control policies, the evidence indicates that even when the potential gains in economic efficiency from unregulated prices are explicit, a significant divide persists between the utilitarian views that standard economic thinking implies and the nonutilitarian values held by the general population
Sacred Values? The Effect of Information on Attitudes toward Payments for Human Organs
No full textAre attitudes about morally controversial (and often prohibited) market transactions affected by information about their costs and benefits? We address this question for the case of payments for human organs. We find in a survey experiment with US residents (N=3,417) that providing information on the potential efficiency benefits of a regulated price mechanism for organs significantly increased support for payments from a baseline of 52 percent to 71 percent. The survey was devised to minimize social desirability biases in responses, and additional analyses validate the interpretation that subjects were reflecting on the case-specific details provided, rather than just reacting to any information
Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Displacement Effects in Pro-Social Behavior
No full textWe present evidence from nearly 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives and from a natural field experiment showing that economic incentives have a positive effect on blood donations without increasing the fraction of donors who are ineligible to donate. The effect increases with the incentive's economic value. However, a substantial proportion of the increase in donations is explained by donors leaving neighboring drives without incentives to attend drives with incentives; this displacement also increases with the economic value of the incentive. We conclude that extrinsic incentives stimulate prosocial behavior, but unless displacement effects are considered, the effect may be overestimated. (JEL D64, H41, I12
Paying for Kidneys? A Randomized Survey and Choice Experiment
No full textWe conducted a randomized survey with 2,666 US residents to study preferences for legalizing payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants supporting or opposing payments regardless of potential transplant gains. However, about 18 percent of respondents would switch to favoring payments for sufficiently large increases in transplants. Preferences for compensation have strong moral foundations; participants especially reject direct payments by patients, which they find would violate principles of fairness. We corroborate the interpretation of our findings with a choice experiment of a costly decision to donate money to a foundation that supports donor compensation
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