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Empirical studies on the economic theory of crime have extensively analyzed the importance of the probability of punishment with regard to premeditated criminal activities. Unplanned crimes also occur, however, and this paper will focus on a very serious and widespread example: the hit-and-run road accident. Using police records for every road accident with injuries or mortalities that took place in Italy in the period 1996–2016, we rely on changes in daylight, both when switching between daylight saving time and winter time and across seasons, as an exogenous source of variation affecting the probability of apprehension and find that the likelihood of hit-and-run conditional on an accident taking place increases by around 20% with darkness. Our results suggest that policies increasing the likelihood of apprehension could be effective in reducing hit-and-run.

Information can have an important impact on health behavior and, according to the World Health Organization, an ‘infodemic’ has accompanied the current pandemic. Observing TV news viewership in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic using actual consumption data, we investigate whether demand for national and local news depends on national or local epidemiological developments, as measured by the number of new positives or the number of current positives on any given day. Exploiting the fact that the impact of the pandemic displays a great deal of variation among the different regions, we find that at the regional level, demand for both national and local news responds to national epidemiological developments rather than to local ones. This has implications regarding the incentives for local politicians to take preventive action.

This paper studies consumers’ choice between two different water tariffs. We document a large inaction in a novel setting where customers face a binary decision and receive simple, detailed, and personalized information about the financial savings they would obtain if they were to switch water tariff. Our empirical framework separates two sources of inertia: inattention and switching costs. The model estimates that half of the customers that would benefit from changing tariff are not aware of the opportunity they are offered. Conditional on paying attention, we estimate median switching costs to be around £100. A model where all customers are assumed to pay attention delivers instead implausibly high switching costs, with a median of £400. This shows the importance of inattention in explaining consumers’ inaction. Looking at the characteristics of the households, our results confirm previous findings that areas where households have higher levels of education or the proportion of minorities is lower display a higher responsiveness to potential savings. The new insight offered by our analysis is that this is entirely driven by attention, whereas switching costs actually increase with education and ethnic homogeneity. Our findings suggest that policies aimed at increasing attention can play a central role in fostering competition among suppliers and reducing inequalities.

The response to the COVID-19 epidemic requires people to undertake actions such as mask-wearing or vaccination that also confer benefits to the whole community, and therefore, are akin to public good contributions. This is the case also for participation to the mass testing that took place between November 18th and 25th, 2020 in the South Tyrol region of Italy, where 361,781 out of 500,607 (72.3%) eligible residents volunteered to take a COVID-19 rapid antigen test. We examine the community characteristics that are associated with higher testing rates. Our findings point to a number of key community determinants of people's willingness to volunteer. Convenience and social capital were important factors. Beyond that, socioeconomic status and religiosity were also both positively related to greater testing, while childhood vaccinations refusal rates show a negative relationship.

We study the impact of audits on water conservation, distinguishing between the information and technological components. We observe water consumption for up to 18 months for 10,000 households in the South East of England who received the visit of a so-called Green Doctor. We find that water-saving devices decrease water consumption by 2-4%, with an effect that is persistent over 18 months. Devices reducing water pressure are particularly effective, while shower timers are ineffective. The information component of the water audit has a large initial impact, but this gradually fades to a drop in consumption of 2% after 12 months. Technology appears to be more cost-effective than information provision and this can help in the design of policy interventions.

We study the impact of audits on water conservation, distinguishing between the information and technological components. We observe water consumption for up to 18 months for 10,000 households in the South East of England who received the visit of a so-called Green Doctor. We find that water-saving devices decrease water consumption by 2-4%, with an effect that is persistent over 18 months. Devices reducing water pressure are particularly effective, while shower timers are ineffective. The information component of the water audit has a large initial impact, but this gradually fades to a drop in consumption of 2% after 12 months. Technology appears to be more cost-effective than information provision and this can help in the design of policy interventions.

We surveyed representative samples of Italian residents at three critical points in the COVID-19 pandemic, to test whether and how intentions to comply with social-isolation restrictions respond to the duration of their possible extension. Individuals reported being more likely to reduce, and less likely to increase, their self-isolation effort if negatively surprised by a given hypothetical extension (i.e., if the extension is longer than what they expected), whereas positive surprises had no impact. These results are consistent with reference-dependent preferences, with individual expectations serving as a reference point, and loss aversion. Our findings indicate that public authorities should carefully manage expectations about policy measures and account for behavioral reactions to deviations from previous announcements.

We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to public services in the United States. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer compared to emails signed with a white-sounding name. Moreover, responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests suggest that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus toward blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race. Finally, we show that attitudes toward the government among blacks are more negative in states with higher discrimination.

We study how intentions to comply with the self-isolation restrictions introduced in Italy to mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic respond to the length of their possible extension. Based on a survey of a representative sample of Italian residents (N=894), we find that respondents who are positively surprised by a given hypothetical extension (i.e. the extension is shorter than what they expected) are more willing to increase their self-isolation. In contrast, negative surprises (extensions longer than expected) are associated with a lower willingness to comply. In a context where individual compliance has collective benefits, but full enforcement is costly and controversial, communication and persuasion have a fundamental role. Our findings provide insights to public authorities on how to announce lockdown measures and manage people's expectations.

There is consensus that meters are necessary for the promotion of efficient water usage. However, available evidence on the benefits and costs of metering is scant, and often based on small samples. We use data from the first large-scale compulsory metering programme in England to study its impact on consumption, social efficiency and distributional outcomes. We find a decrease in consumption of 22% following meter installation, a considerably higher value than assumed as a policy target. This result implies that, overall, the benefits of metering outweigh its costs. We also document a large heterogeneity in reaction, with many households showing low sensitivity to the new tariff. This novel finding suggests that selective metering, where only more price-sensitive households receive meters, would deliver even higher social welfare. Looking at distributional effects, we find similar reduction in consumption across income groups, although only high-income households gain financially from the new tariff.

This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important - and hitherto neglected - spillover effects on fatal car accidents. Using the universe of fatal car accidents in the United States from 1990 to 2015, we find that a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.6% increase in fatal car accidents that happen after the stock market opening. A battery of falsification tests supports a causal interpretation of this finding. Our results are consistent with immediate emotions stirred by a negative stock market performance influencing the number of fatal accidents, in particular among inexperienced investors.

Employees are more willing to work and put effort in for an employer that genuinely promotes the greater good. Some are also willing to give up part of their compensation to contribute to a social cause they share. Being able to attract a motivated workforce is particularly important for the public sector, where performance is usually more difficult to measure, but this goal remains elusive. Paying people more or underlining the career opportunities (as opposed to the social aspects) associated with public sector jobs is instrumental in attracting a more productive workforce, while a proper selection process may mitigate the negative impact on intrinsic motivation.

We explore what motivates the philanthropic activity of extremely wealthy individuals and families. We focus on a recent large-scale philanthropic initiative by billionaires, the Giving Pledge, a commitment to donating half or more of one's wealth. We perform two pieces of analysis: first, we investigate what personal characteristics of billionaires are associated with becoming a pledger. Second, we undertake a textual analysis of the pledgers' letters describing their philanthropic outlook and classify their motivation into ten categories. We then correlate these motivational categories with various personal characteristics of the pledgers. The main insights obtained from our analysis is that pledgers are more likely to be self-made billionaires, and that their philanthropy is impact-driven.

In this paper we present evidence of self-image concerns in charitable giving using a laboratory experiment. Subjects make a series of three decisions of allocating an endowment of £10 between themselves and a passive recipient that is either a charity or the experimenters. When making these decision subjects are informed that one of them will be chosen randomly at the end to determine payoffs. After all decisions have been made and it has been revealed which decision will determine payoffs we offer subjects an opportunity to opt out from their initial decision and receive £10 instead. We find that almost a quarter of subjects choose to opt out, while around one third opt out from a positive donation. The fact that a subject decides to revise a decision to give and chooses instead to keep the whole amount – an option that was available when she made the first decision and was not exercised – indicates that giving in the first instance was not motivated solely by altruism toward the recipient. We argue that opting out can be explained through a combination of a reduced benefit of self-signaling due to satiation, and an increase in the costs of giving at the opt out stage, as they are realized with certainty.

Women's labour market outcomes have improved substantially in the past decades, both in absolute terms and relative to men, in the United States and Western European countries as well as in several other countries around the world. Specifically, gender gaps have narrowed considerably (and in several cases disappeared) in human capital accumulation (educational attainment), labour force participation, hours of work and occupation. Claudia Goldin referred to this phenomenon as a 'grand gender convergence' (Goldin 2014). Yet, gender gaps in earnings and leadership still persist. Women earn substantially less than men and are under-represented in leadership positions in firms and organisations more broadly. The presence and persistence of gender gaps in earnings and leadership is cause for great concern for both reasons of social justice and efficiency, to the extent that the gender imbalances reflect a sub-optimal allocation of human capital in firms and in the economy. In this article, we focus on the causes and consequences of female-male gaps in earnings and representation at the top of organisations. Gender gaps in wages and leadership are one of the most researched topics in labour economics and beyond. Rather than attempting to summarise the vast literature on these subjects, we present a selective discussion of recent empirical work in an attempt to highlight recent findings on causes and consequences of gender gaps in the labour market and to discuss the main knowledge gaps and what we believe are some of the most promising areas for future research.1 Most of the papers we focus on refer to the United States, but the trends and patterns described are likely to apply more broadly.

This paper derives the implications for compliance and fiscal revenues of a tax base that is the product of several factors. For instance, in the case of import tariffs, the tax base is the product of quantity and unit value, both reported to, and during an audit assessed by, the custom authority. Import tariffs are particularly interesting as custom receipts represent an important share of government revenues in many developing countries and there has recently been a surge in empirical studies showing how evasion in this field is a pervasive phenomenon. I show that, with a multiplicative tax base, when the fiscal authority has an imperfect detection technology a greater declaration in one dimension actually increases the fine when evasion in the other dimension is detected. Therefore, there is an additional incentive for the taxpayer to underdeclare and a multiplicative tax base is subject to more evasion, compared to a tax base that can be assessed directly. As a result, fiscal revenues decrease with the dimensionality of the tax base. Also, voluntary compliance and fiscal revenues may be higher when the importer is required to declare only the total value of imports instead of quantity and unit value separately. This paper provides an argument in favour of uniform or specific tariffs and a reason for why a flat tax may improve compliance.

Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers have incomplete information about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or negative aspects of online privacy, thereby mitigating the informational problem, can affect consumers’ privacy actions and attitudes. Results of two online survey experiments indicate that participants adopt a more conservative stance on disclosing identifiable information, such as name and email, even when they are informed about positive attitudes of companies towards their privacy. On the other hand, they do not change their attitudes and social actions towards privacy. These findings suggest that privacy concerns are dormant and may manifest when consumers are asked to think about privacy; and that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of disclosing personal information.

Resume. S'appuyant sur les donnees d'Eurostat pour la periode 1999–2006, les auteurs etudient l'evolution de l'anciennete dans l'emploi des salaries de l'Union europeenne. Ils n'observent pas de baisse generalisee de cette anciennete, mais un raccourcissement tendanciel parmi les jeunes travailleurs (15–24 ans) dans de nombreux pays. Leurs resultats montrent que cette tendance est associee a une plus faible protection de l'emploi conferee et par le droit et par la presence de syndicats. Etant donne le faible pouvoir de negociation individuelle des jeunes travailleurs, la tendance a une plus forte individualisation des relations d'emploi pourrait, en effet, plus particulierement les toucher.

Los autores estudian la antiguedad en el trabajo en toda la Union Europea con datos relativos al periodo 1999-2006. La antiguedad no descendio durante esos anos en muchos paises europeos, con una excepcion: los trabajadores de 15 a 24 anos de edad. Segun el analisis de regresion que efectuan, ello guarda relacion con el debilitamiento de las leyes de empleo y de los sindicatos. Dado que los trabajadores jovenes tienen poca capacidad de negociar personalmente sus condiciones laborales, la individualizacion de la relacion de trabajo puede perjudicarles mas que al resto.

Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails are less likely to receive a response if signed by a black-sounding name compared to a white-sounding name. Given a response rate of 72% for white senders, emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer. We also find that responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests demonstrate that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race.

In many countries there is a considerable gender gap in enrolment for a bachelor’s degree in Economics, arguably an important stepping stone towards positions of influence in policymaking and occupations paying relatively high wages. We investigate the sources of this gap by looking in detail at the university admission process in the UK. We use a 50% random sample of administrative data covering all university applications in 2008 and find no evidence of universities discriminating against female applicants. What we find is that girls are less likely to apply for a bachelor’s degree in Economics to start with, even if once they apply their likelihood of enrolling is the same as for boys. Girls are less likely to study Maths in high school and this may deter them from applying to study Economics at the university level. However, even among those who have studied Maths, females are less likely to apply than males, suggesting that differences in the choice of A level subjects cannot explain the whole gap. (JEL codes: I21, I23, I28, J24.)

Welfare benefits in the Nordic countries are often tied to employment. We argue that this is one of the factors behind the success of the Nordic model, where a comprehensive welfare state is associated with high employment. In a general equilibrium setting, the underlining mechanism works through wage moderation and job creation. The benefits make it more important to hold a job, thus lower wages will be accepted, and more jobs created. Moreover, we show that the incentive to acquire higher education improves, further boosting employment in the long run. These positive effects help in counteracting the negative impact of taxation. Through numerical simulations, we show how this mechanism can contribute to explain the better labor market performance and more equitable income distribution of Nordic countries compared to Continental European ones.

This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying the two intrinsic motivations for giving: warm glow and pure altruism. In particular, we implemented a within-subject experimental design with three treatments: (i) one, where the recipient is the experimenters, which measures altruistic feelings towards the experimenters (T1), (ii) the Crumpler and Grossman (2008) design in which the recipient is a charity, and the dictator's donation crowds out one-for-one a donation by the experimenters, which aims at measuring warm glow giving (T2), (iii) a third one, with a charity recipient and no crowding out, which elicits both types of altruism (T3). We use T1 to assess to what extent altruistic feelings towards the experimenters are a potential confound for measuring warm glow in T2. We find giving in T1 not to be significantly different from T2, suggesting that the Crumpler and Grossman test is an upper bound estimate of warm glow giving. We provide a lower bound estimate based on the behavior of subjects whose estimate of warm glow giving in T2 is not confounded, that is, those who do not display altruistic feelings towards the experimenters in T1. We use these two estimates to decompose giving in T3 into warm glow and pure altruism and find them to be almost equally important. We also propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one employed here, warm glow benefits accumulate and may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not. Keywords; dictator game, warm glow, pure altruism, charitable giving

Peer effects arise in situations where workers observe each others’ work activity. In this paper, we disentangle the effect of observing a peer from that of being observed by a peer, by setting up a real effort experiment in which we manipulate the observability of performance. In particular, we randomize subjects into three groups: in the first one subjects are observed by another subject, but do not observe anybody; in the second one subjects observe somebody else's performance, but are not observed by anybody; in the last group subjects work in isolation, neither observing, nor being observed. To assess the importance of payoff externalities in the emergence of peer effects, we consider both a piece rate compensation scheme, where pay depends solely on own performance, and a team compensation scheme, where pay also depends on the performance of other team members. Overall, we find some evidence that subjects who are observed increase productivity at least initially when compensation is team based, while we find that subjects observing react to what they see when compensation is based only on own performance.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between earnings and charitable giving, in an environment in which earnings depend on luck but not in a manner that makes its contribution obvious. We set up a real effort experiment, in which subjects enter data in four one-hour occasions and are paid a piece rate. From the second occasion onwards, we randomly assign half of the subjects to a treatment with higher piece rates, without the subjects being explicitly made aware of the random assignment into the two groups. At the end we ask subjects whether they want to donate a share of their earnings to a charity of their choice. We find that, despite large differences in earnings due to the different piece rates, subjects receiving the higher piece rate are actually less likely to give, and that givers in the two groups give the same share of their total earnings. Charities receive the same average donation from members of the two groups, indicating that charitable giving by subjects in this experiment does not increase with income. We discuss how these results can be explained by self-serving attribution bias.

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competi- tive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low- productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral .scal system into a regressive one. A spike in the wage distribution at the mini- mum wage level appears and a positive correlation between the size of the spike and the size of the informal economy is predicted and documented using cross-country data for Europe. A further result is that employees whose officially declared earnings appear to be boosted by a minimum wage hike actually experience a decline in their true income. This prediction finds support in an empirical test using the massive increase in the minimum wage that took place in Hungary in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment.

In-work benefits are becoming an increasingly relevant labour market policy, gradually expanding in scope and geographical coverage. This paper investigates the equilibrium impact of in-work benefits and contrasts it with the traditional partial equilibrium analysis. We find under which conditions accounting for equilibrium wage adjustments amplifies the impact of in-work benefits on search intensity, participation, employment, and unemployment, compared to a framework in which wages are fixed. We also account for the financing of these benefits and determine the level of benefits necessary to achieve efficiency in a labour market characterized by search externalities.

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers’ pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men’s behavior is not affected by any of the treatments

Import tariff receipts represent an important share of government revenues in many developing countries and there has recently been a surge in empirical studies showing how evasion in this field is a pervasive phenomenon. In the case of import tariffs, the tax base is the product of quantity and unit value, both of which have to be reported and need to be assessed by the custom authority during an audit. I show that when the fiscal authority has an imperfect detection technology, there is an additional incentive for the taxpayer to underdeclare, as a greater declaration in one dimension actually increases the fine when evasion in the other dimension is detected, and a tax base presenting this feature is subject to more evasion compared to a tax base that can be assessed directly. Also, when enforcement capacity is low, voluntary compliance is higher when the importer is required to declare only the total value of imports.

Based on Eurostat data on wage employment for the period 1999–2006, this article investigates the dynamics of job tenure across the European Union. The authors’ analysis shows no generalized decline in job tenure, but a trend towards shorter tenure among young workers (aged 15–24 years) in many European countries. Their regression results indicate that this trend is associated with the weakening of employment protection provided by law and by trade unions. Given young workers’ weak individual bargaining power, the trend towards individualization of the employment relationship may thus affect them disproportionately.

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers’ pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men’s behavior is not affected by any of the treatments.

This paper examines the interaction between minimum wage legislation and tax evasion by employed labor. I develop a model in which firms and workers may agree to report less than the true amount of earnings to the fiscalauthorities. I show that introducing a minimum wage creates a spike in the distribution of declared earnings and induces higher compliance by some agents, thus reducing their disposable income. The comparison of food consumption before and after the massive minimum wage hike that took place in Hungary in 2001 reveals that households who appear to benefit from it actually experienced a drop compared to similar but unaffected household, thus supporting the prediction of the theory.

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competitive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low-productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral fiscal system into a regressive one. A spike in the wage distribution at the minimum wage level appears and a positive correlation between the size of the spike and the size of the informal economy is predicted and documented using cross-country data for Europe. A further result is that employees whose officially declared earnings appear to be boosted by a minimum wage hike actually experience a decline in their true income. This prediction finds support in an empirical test using the massive increase in the minimum wage that took place in Hungary in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment.

A model of the labor market is built where imperfect detection in case of auditing induces underreporting of earnings. The introduction of the minimum wage makes some workers increase compliance, boosting fiscal revenues. A spike at the minimum wage level appears in the distribution of earnings. The model predicts a positive correlation between the size of the spike at the minimum wage level and the size of the informal economy. Empirical evidence supporting this prediction is presented.

This paper contributes to the policy debate on minimum wage by highlighting its role in enforcing compliance with fiscal rules in economies where underreporting of earnings is widespread. First, I propose a simple model exploring the interaction between the minimum wage and underreporting of earnings. Then, I provide supportive evidence by documenting a positive correlation within European labour markets between the proportion of full‐time employees with earnings on the minimum wage and the extent of underreporting of earnings in the economy. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that a high spike in the wage distribution at the minimum wage level is, in some contexts, a fiscal issue, more than a labour market issue, and therefore it would be incorrect to consider a high spike as an indication of a binding minimum wage. Also, differentiating the minimum wage along dimensions related to earnings (e.g. education, sector, or occupation) makes sense from an enforcement perspective. J38, H26