Contributions published at Department of Economics (Florian Scheuer)

This article presents a study of the careers of French colonial governors between 1830 and 1960. We consider empires as the by-product of social entities structuring themselves. Specifically, we analyze the process of the emergence of this professional group with respect to other professional groups within the imperial space and the French metropolitan space, building on the concept of linked ecologies. Using data on the career of 637 colonial governors between 1830 and 1960, we examine how variations in the recruitment of these senior civil servants actually reflect the professionalization of this group. We rely on an optimal matching technique to distinguish typical sequence models and identify nine common career trajectories that can be grouped into four main clusters. We further compare the share of each cluster in the population of governors over time and show that the rise of the colonial cluster during the Interwar period corresponded to the peak of the administrative autonomy in the colonial space. We argue that this process is consistent with the professionalization of the governors’ corps, which is embodied by a common career within the colonial administration and a collective identity as a group.

Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health. However, self-regulation is not a school subject, and knowledge about how to generate lasting improvements in self-regulation and academic achievements with easily scalable, low-cost interventions is still limited. Here we report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders. We demonstrate that the treatment increases children’s skills in terms of impulse control and self-regulation while also generating lasting improvements in academic skills such as reading and monitoring careless mistakes. Moreover, it has a substantial effect on children’s long-term school career by increasing the likelihood of enroling in an advanced secondary school track three years later. Thus, self-regulation teaching can be integrated into the regular school curriculum at low cost, is easily scalable, and can substantially improve important abilities and children’s educational career path.

When did overseas trade start to matter for living standards? Traditional real-wage indices suggest that living standards in Europe stagnated before 1800. In this paper, we argue that welfare may have actually risen substantially, but surreptitiously, because of an influx of new goods. Colonial “luxuries” such as tea, coffee, and sugar became highly coveted. Together with more simple household staples such as potatoes and tomatoes, overseas goods transformed European diets after the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. They became household items in many countries by the end of the 18th century. We apply two standard methods to calculate broad orders of magnitude of the resulting welfare gains. While they cannot be assessed precisely, gains from greater variety may well have been big enough to boost European real incomes by 10% or more (depending on the assumptions used).

Using newly collected data on death rates and aerial victories of more than 5,000 German fighter pilots during World War II, we examine the effects of public recognition on performance and risk-taking. When a particular pilot is honoured publicly, both the victory rate and the death rate of his former peers increase. Fellow pilots react more if they come from the same region of Germany, or if they worked closely with him. Our results suggest that personal rivalry can be a prime motivating force, and that non-financial rewards can lead to a crowd-in of both effort and risk-taking via social connections.

This paper studies random vectors X featuring symmetric distributions in that i) the order of the random variables in X does not affect its distribution, or ii) the distribution of X is symmetric at zero. We derive a number of characterization results for such random vectors, thereby connecting the distributional symmetry to various notions of how (Euclidean) functions have been regarded as symmetric. In addition, we present results about the marginals and conditionals of symmetrically distributed random vectors, and apply some of our results to various transformations of random vectors, e.g., to sums or products of random variables, or in context of a choice probability system known from economic models of discrete choice.

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers in Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences in prices and quantities purchased from farmers through a model of Cournot competition reveals differentiation between traders is low. Combining this result with quasi-experimental variation in world prices shows that the number of traders competing is 50 percent higher than the number operating in a village. Own-price and cross-price supply elasticities are high. Farmers face a competitive market in this first stage of the value chain.

I examine how one central aspect of the family environment - sibling sex composition - affects women’s gender conformity. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother relative to a sister for first-born women. I show that women with a brother acquire more traditional gender roles as measured through their choice of occupation and partner. This results in a stronger response to motherhood in labor market outcomes. As a relevant mechanism, I provide evidence of increased gender-specialized parenting in families with mixed-sex children. Finally, I find persistent effects on the next generation of girls.

We assess the predictive power of survey measures of social capital with a new behavioral data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries, we find that survey measures of social capital—especially questions concerning generalized trust or generalized morality — are strongly and significantly correlated with country-level differences in wallet reporting rates. A second finding is that lost wallet reporting rates predict unique variation in the outputs of social capital, such as economic development and government effectiveness, not captured by existing measures.

Wissenschaftliche Durchbrüche sind eine wesentliche Quelle des Wohlstands. Sie kommt zum Versiegen, wenn Mittel und Musse dafür fehlen und der Forschungsbetrieb bürokratisch wird.

Child labor is a pervasive practice; according to the International Labor Organization, there are 160 million child workers worldwide. That figure might, however, greatly underestimate the extent of the issue, since child labor indicators are typically based on surveys with parents – who have no incentive to truthfully disclose that their children work. This, in turn, poses important challenges to the ability of governments and international organizations to monitor and enforce children’s rights. Combining survey data, based on independent reports from primary school children and their parents in two cocoa-producing regions of Côte d’Ivoire, with novel third-party data from costly certification of cocoa production in these regions, partly based on satellite imagery, we show that adults dramatically under-report child labor in our study sample by a factor of at least 60%; in turn, children self-reports provide accurate regional and aggregate accounts of child labor. Evaluating the impacts of a campaign to discourage child labor, we also show that parents’ reports not only underestimate its prevalence, but can even lead to the wrong conclusions about whether and how policy interventions affect child labor.

Did the dramatic learning losses from remote learning in the context of COVID-19 stem at least partly from schools having overlooked students’ socio-emotional skills – such as their ability to self-regulate emotions, their mental models, motivation, and grit – during the emergency transition to remote learning? We study this question using a cluster-randomized control trial with 18, 256 high-school students across 87 schools in the State of Goiás, Brazil. The intervention sent behavioral nudges through text messages to students or their caregivers, targeting their socio-emotional skills during remote learning. Here we show that these messages significantly increased standardized test scores relative to the control group, preventing 7.5% of learning losses in math and 24% in Portuguese, consistent with the hypothesis that neglecting students’ socio-emotional skills magnified learning losses during the pandemic.

Humans form impressions toward individuals of their own social groups (ingroup members) and of different social groups (outgroup members). Outgroup-focused theories predict that intergroup impressions are mainly shaped by experiences with outgroup individuals, while ingroup-focused theories predict that ingroup experiences play a dominant role. Here we test predictions from these two psychological theories by estimating how intergroup impressions are dynamically shaped when people learn from both ingroup and outgroup experiences. While undergoing fMRI, male participants had identical experiences with different ingroup or outgroup members and rated their social closeness and impressions toward the ingroup and the outgroup. Behavioral results showed an initial ingroup bias in impression ratings which was significantly reduced over the course of learning, with larger effects in individuals with stronger ingroup identification. Computational learning models revealed that these changes in intergroup impressions were predicted by the weight given to ingroup prediction errors. Neurally, the individual weight for ingroup prediction errors was related to the coupling between the left inferior parietal lobule and the left anterior insula, which, in turn, predicted learning-related changes in intergroup impressions. Our findings provide computational and neural evidence for ingroup-focused theories, highlighting the importance of ingroup experiences in shaping social impressions in intergroup settings.

We study optimal employment contracts for present-biased employees if firms cannot commit to long-term contracts. Assuming that an employee's effort increases his chances to obtain a future benefit, we show that individuals who are naive about their present bias will actually be better off than sophisticated or time-consistent individuals. Moreover, firms might benefit from being ignorant about the extent of an employee's naiveté. Our results also indicate that naive employees might be harmed by policies such as employment protection or a minimum wage, whereas sophisticated employees are better off.

In a controlled laboratory experiment we investigate whether time pressure influences voting decisions, and in particular the degree of strategic (insincere) voting. We find that participants under time constraints are more sincere when using the widelyemployed Plurality Voting method. That is, time pressure might reduce strategic voting and hence misrepresentation of preferences. However, there are no effects for Approval Voting, in line with arguments that this method provides no incentives for strategic voting.

We study how parents transmit patience to their children with a focus on two theoretically important channels of socialization: parenting values and parental involvement. Using high-quality administrative and survey data, and a setting without reverse causality concerns, we document a substantial intergenerational transmission of patience. We show that parenting values represent a key channel of the transmission. Authoritative parents (high in control and warmth) do not transmit patience to their children, in contrast to authoritarian and permissive parents. Thus, the authoritative parenting style seems to counteract the transmission of impatience. While parental involvement does not appear to be a relevant channel at the aggregate level, we document important heterogeneity by parent gender.

We present the family of Excess Payoff Dynamics for normal-form games, where the growth of a strategy depends only on its current proportion and the excess payoff, i.e., the payoff advantage of the strategy over the average population payoff. Requiring dependence only on the own excess payoff and a natural sign-preserving condition, the class essentially reduces to aggregate monotonic dynamics, a functional generalization of the Replicator Dynamics. However, Excess Payoff Dynamics also include a different subclass which contains the Replicator Dynamics, the Brown-von Neumann-Nash Dynamics, and other interesting examples as, e.g., satisficing dynamics. We also clarify the relation to excess demand dynamics from microeconomics.

Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality? In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings’ gender on adults’ personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering nine countries (United States, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, China, and Indonesia). We investigated the personality traits of risk tolerance, trust, patience, locus of control, and the Big Five. We found no meaningful causal effects of the gender of the next younger sibling and no associations with the gender of the next older sibling. Given the high statistical power and consistent results in the overall sample and relevant subsamples, our results suggest that siblings’ gender does not systematically affect personality.

Leadership theories in sociology and psychology argue that effective leaders influence follower behavior not only through the design of incentives and institutions, but also through personal abilities to persuade and motivate. Although charismatic leadership has received considerable attention in the management literature, existing research has not yet established causal evidence for an effect of leader charisma on follower performance in incentivized and economically relevant situations. We report evidence from field and laboratory experiments that investigate whether a leader’s charisma—in the form of a stylistically different motivational speech—can induce individuals to undertake personally costly but socially beneficial actions. In the field experiment, we find that workers who are given a charismatic speech increase their output by about 17% relative to workers who listen to a standard speech. This effect is statistically significant and comparable in size to the positive effect of high-powered financial incentives. We then investigate the effect of charisma in a series of laboratory experiments in which subjects are exposed to motivational speeches before playing a repeated public goods game. Our results reveal that a higher number of charismatic elements in the speech can increase public good contributions by up to 19%. However, we also find that the effectiveness of charisma varies and appears to depend on the social context in which the speech is delivered.

Transaction costs are omnipresent in markets yet are often omitted in economic models. We show that their presence can fundamentally alter incentives and welfare in markets in which the price equates supply and demand. We categorize transaction costs into two types. Asymptotically uninfluenceable transaction costs—such as fixed and price fees—preserve the key asymptotic properties of markets without transaction costs, namely strategyproofness, efficiency, and robustness to misspecified beliefs and to aggregate uncertainty. In contrast, influenceable transaction costs—such as spread fees—lead to complex strategic behavior (which we call price guessing) and may result in severe market failure. In our analysis of optimal design we focus on transaction costs that are fees collected by a platform as revenue. We show how optimal design depends on the traders’ beliefs. In particular, with common prior beliefs, any asymptotically uninfluenceable fee schedule can be scaled to be optimal, while purely influenceable fee schedules lead to zero revenue. Our insights extend beyond markets equalizing demand and supply.