Essays in Behavioral and Identity Economics

Abstract

I leverage survey methodology and controlled decision environments to study the role of identity across a wide variety of domains of economic importance. Chapter 1, which is co-authored with Benjamin Enke and Florian Zimmermann, contributes a novel, survey-based measurement tool for moral universalism - the extent to which people exhibit the same level of altruism and trust towards strangers as towards in-group members. We deploy this measurement tool in a representative sample of the U.S. population to link moral universalism to sociodemographic correlates and behaviors across finance, education, social networks and loneliness, and charitable giving. In follow-up work also coauthored with Benjamin Enke and Florian Zimmermann, Chapter 2 explores the unique role of universalism in structuring the cluster of policy views in the West that has come to be synonymous with left-vs.-right-wing political ideology. Finally, Chapter 3 provides an exploratory analysis of race-based positional preferences - how much greater or lesser “second-place aversion” is among white male subjects when the first-place peer is a minority vs. when a peer is not a minority. In an online lab experiment, we exogenously and without deception vary subjects’ placement in a ranking and the race of the peer in that ranking, measuring ensuing behaviors along the dimensions of effort provision, credit for work, and sabotage. We find strongest evidence of race-based positional preferences on effort provision, with underpowered but economically-significant findings on the dimensions of credit for work and sabotage.