News
Financial Incentives for Vaccination Do Not Have Negative Unintended Consequences
Nature, 613, 2023.
Equal lead author* with
Florian Schneider*, Pol Campos-Mercade*,
Stephan Meier, Devin Pope, Erik Wengström
Financial incentives to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviours often trigger initial behavioural change, but a large academic literature warns against using them. We use a unique combination of random exposure to financial incentives, population-wide administrative vaccination records and rich survey data. We find no negative consequences of financial incentives; we can reject even small negative impacts of offering financial incentives on future vaccination uptake, morals, trust and perceived safety.
Accompanied by the following editorial in Nature putting our results into context: Vaccine incentives do not backfire — policymakers take note
Emotions and Risk Attitudes
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14, 3, 2022.
Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. Using a large panel data set, I identify happiness, anger, and fear as significant correlates of within-person changes in risk attitudes.
Monetary Incentives Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations
Science, 374 (6569), 2021.
Equal lead author* with
Pol Campos-Mercade*, Florian Schneider*,
Stephan Meier, Devin Pope, Erik Wengström
Selected by Science for First Release
Stalling COVID-19 vaccination rates threaten public health. We found that modest monetary payments of $24 (SEK 200) increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points (p=0.005), from a baseline rate of 71.6%. In contrast, providing information, highlighting social benefits, or drafting an argument did not increase vaccination uptake.
Accompanied by the following piece in Science putting our results into context: Cash incentives, ethics, and COVID-19 vaccination
Prosociality Predicts Health Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Journal of Public Economics 195, 2021.
Pol Campos-Mercade, Florian Schneider and Erik Wengström
Economic and epidemiological models of disease transmission abstract from prosocial motivations as a driver of behaviors that impact the health of others. In an incentivized study, we find that more prosocial individuals are more likely to follow physical distancing guidelines, stay home when sick, and buy face masks.
Working Papers
Early Socialization and the Gender Wage Gap
Demid Getik
Lund Department of Economics WP No. 2021:13
We study the impact of early socialization on gender inequality in the labor market. To this end, we link the gender environment in the primary-school cohort to later occupations and wages. We find that women exposed to more girls at this critical age earn more later on, leading to a reduction in the gender wage gap. We explore mechanisms and find that women exposed to a more female-dominated environment select into less gender-stereotypical occupations with higher wage potential. The gender environment at an early age, therefore, shapes career trajectories and lifetime earnings.
Early Release and Recidivism
first author; with Jonathan Levav, Stephan Meier and Liora Avnaim-Pesso
IZA Discussion Paper No. 13035
Does early release decrease or increase the probability that ex-convicts will return to prison? We exploit unique data from Israeli courts, where appearance before the judge throughout the day has an arbitrary component. We first show that judges more often deny parole requests of prisoners appearing further from the judges‘ last break. We then use this variation in instrumental variable estimations and find that early releases reduce the propensity of prisoners to return to prison. Robustness checks suggest that later and earlier cases are largely comparable and that potential selection is unlikely to explain the results.
Selected Work in Progress
Medical Guidelines and Doctor Behavior
first author with Ziad Obermeyer, Devin Pope, Collin Raymond, and Kevin Volpp
New Behavioral Interventions and Vaccination Uptake
Pol Campos-Mercade, Stephan Meier, Devin Pope, Florian Schneider, Erik Wengström
Discrimination, Emotions and Decision-making
Douglas Bernheim, Jonathan Levav, and Florian Schneider
Emotions and Patience
(previously: Emotions, Risk Attitudes, and Patience)
Publications
Financial Incentives for Vaccination Do Not Have Negative Unintended Consequences
Nature, 613, 2023.
Equal lead author* with
Florian Schneider*, Pol Campos-Mercade*,
Stephan Meier, Devin Pope, Erik Wengström
Financial incentives to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviours often trigger initial behavioural change, but a large academic literature warns against using them. Critics warn that financial incentives can crowd out prosocial motivations and reduce perceived safety and trust, thereby reducing healthy behaviours when no payments are offered and eroding morals more generally. Here we report findings from a large-scale, pre-registered study in Sweden that causally measures the unintended consequences of offering financial incentives for taking the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. We use a unique combination of random exposure to financial incentives, population-wide administrative vaccination records and rich survey data. We find no negative consequences of financial incentives; we can reject even small negative impacts of offering financial incentives on future vaccination uptake, morals, trust and perceived safety. In a complementary study, we find that informing US residents about the existence of state incentive programmes also has no negative consequences. Our findings inform not only the academic debate on financial incentives for behaviour change but also policy-makers who consider using financial incentives to change behaviour.
Emotions and Risk Attitudes
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14, 2, 2022.
(previously: Emotions, Risk Attitudes, and Patience)
SOEPpapers 1118/2020 (incl. results on patience: SOEPpapers 1041/2019)
Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people’s emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a large panel data set, I identify happiness, anger, and fear as significant correlates of within-person changes in risk attitudes. Robustness checks indicate a limited role of alternative explanations. An event study around the death of a parent or child further confirms a large relationship between emotions and risk attitudes.
Monetary Incentives Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations
Science, 374 (6569), 2021.
Co-lead author* and co-corresponding author
Pol Campos-Mercade*, Florian Schneider*, Stephan Meier, Devin Pope, Erik Wengström
Selected by Science for First Release
Stalling COVID-19 vaccination rates threaten public health. To increase vaccination rates, governments across the globe are considering using monetary incentives. We present evidence on the effect of guaranteed payments on COVID-19 vaccination uptake. We ran a large pre-registered randomized controlled trial (N=8,286) in Sweden and linked the data to population-wide administrative vaccination records. We found that modest monetary payments of $24 (SEK 200) increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points (p=0.005), from a baseline rate of 71.6%. In contrast, behavioral nudges increased stated intentions to vaccinate but had only small and not statistically significant impacts on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of modest monetary incentives to increase vaccination rates.
Prosociality Predicts Health Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Journal of Public Economics 195, 2021.
Top 10 SSRN download list for Behavioral and Experimental Economics as well as Law and Psychology
Pol Campos-Mercade, Florian Schneider and Erik Wengström
Socially responsible behavior is crucial for slowing the spread of infectious diseases. However, economic and epidemiological models of disease transmission abstract from prosocial motivations as a driver of behaviors that impact the health of others. In an incentivized study, we show that a large majority of people are very reluctant to put others at risk for their personal benefit. Moreover, this experimental measure of prosociality predicts health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, measured in a separate and ostensibly unrelated study with the same people. Prosocial individuals are more likely to follow physical distancing guidelines, stay home when sick, and buy face masks. We also find that prosociality measured two years before the pandemic predicts health behaviors during the pandemic. Our findings indicate that prosociality is a stable, long-term predictor of policy-relevant behaviors, suggesting that the impact of policies on a population may depend on the degree of prosociality.
Anticipation of COVID-19 Vaccines Reduces Willingness to Socially Distance
Journal of Health Economics, 80, 2021.
Ola Andersson, Pol Campos-Mercade, and Erik Wengström
IFN Working Paper No. 1378
We investigate how the anticipation of COVID-19 vaccines affects voluntary social distancing. In a large-scale preregistered survey experiment with a representative sample, we study whether providing information about the safety, effectiveness, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines affects the willingness to comply with public health guidelines. We find that vaccine information reduces peoples’ voluntary social distancing, adherence to hygiene guidelines, and their willingness to stay at home. Getting positive information on COVID-19 vaccines induces people to believe in a swifter return to normal life. The results indicate an important behavioral drawback of successful vaccine development: An increased focus on vaccines can lower compliance with public health guidelines and accelerate the spread of infectious disease. The results imply that, as vaccinations roll out and the end of a pandemic feels closer, policies aimed at increasing social distancing will be less effective, and stricter policies might be required.
Peer Gender and Mental Health
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 197, 2022.
Demid Getik
Adolescent mental health is key for later well-being. Yet, causal evidence on environmental drivers of adolescent mental health is scant. We study how an important classroom feature–the gender composition in compulsory-school–affects mental health. We use Swedish administrative data (N=576,285) to link variation in gender composition across classrooms within cohorts to mental health. We find that a higher share of female peers in a classroom increases the incidence of mental health diagnoses, particularly among boys. The effect persists into adulthood. Peer composition is thus an important and persistent driver of mental health.
Tobacco Sales Prohibition and Teen Smoking
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 188, 2021.
Reto Odermatt and Alois Stutzer
We evaluate one of the most prevalent prohibitory policies: banning the sales of tobacco to teens. We exploit the staggered introduction of sales bans across Switzerland and the European Union from 1990 to 2016. The estimates indicate a less than 1 percentage point reduction in teen smoking because of the bans. The reduction is substantially lower than the 5 percentage point reduction expected by health officials. We examine additional outcomes relevant to assessing any prohibitory policy. We find that teens circumvent the bans through peers. Moreover, they consider smokers less cool but do not think smoking is more dangerous.
Rain, Emotions and Voting for the Status Quo
European Economic Review 119, 2019.
Lukas Schmid and Alois Stutzer
Do emotions affect the decision between change and the status quo? We exploit exogenous variation in emotions caused by rain and analyze data on more than 870,000 municipal vote outcomes in Switzerland to address this question. The empirical tests are based on administrative ballot outcomes and individual postvote survey data. We find that rain decreases the share of votes for political change. Our robustness checks suggest that changes in the composition of the electorate or changes in information acquisition do not drive this result. In addition, we provide evidence that rain might have altered the outcome of several high-stake votes. We discuss the psychological mechanism and document that rain reduces the willingness to take risks, a pattern that is consistent with the observed reduction in the support of change.
Overstrained Citizens? The Number of Ballot Propositions and the Quality of the Decision Process in Direct Democracy
European Journal of Political Economy 59, 2019.
Michael Baltensperger and Alois Stutzer
We study how the number of ballot propositions affects the quality of decision making in direct democracy, as reflected in citizens‘ knowledge, voting behavior, and attitudes toward democracy. Using three comprehensive data sets from Switzerland with over 3,500 propositions, we exploit variation in the number of federal and cantonal propositions. Voters know the most about the content of federal propositions when they are exclusively presented and less with a high number of concurrent cantonal propositions on the ballot. Across other outcomes we find no consistent indications that – for the observed variation in the exposure to popular votes – a high number of propositions impedes the quality of decision making in Swiss federal direct democracy. In the medium to longer term, more federal propositions on the ballot rather relate to higher perceived political influence and satisfaction with democracy.
Limited Self–Control, Obesity and the Loss of Happiness
Health Economics 25(11), 2016.
Alois Stutzer
Is obesity the consequence of an optimally chosen lifestyle or do people consume too much relative to their long-term preferences? The latter perspective accepts that people might face self-control problems when exposed to the immediate gratification from food. We exploit unique survey data for Switzerland in multinomial logit and ordered probit regressions to study (i) the covariates of obesity including indicators of self-control and (ii) the consequences of obesity on the subjective well-being of people with limited willpower. Our main finding is that obesity decreases the well-being of individuals who report having limited self-control, but not otherwise.
