Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization最新文献

{"title":"Altruism, human capital and environmental preservation in a globalized economy","authors":"Stéphane Bouché ,&nbsp;Leonor Modesto","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106940","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106940","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyzes the impact of trade openness on education and environmental preservation choices in a two country model where both countries only differ in their shares of skilled workers. Parents may invest in their children’s education increasing their probability to become skilled and in maintenance investment in order to preserve present and future environmental quality. Under autarky, unskilled individuals in the skill scarce economy are unable to invest in education due to borrowing constraints. Moreover, only skilled individuals in both countries choose to invest in environmental preservation. Openness to trade modifies relative factor prices and increases pollution. This allows for human capital convergence between both economies but overall environmental quality decreases, suggesting a potential trade-off between income convergence at the global level and environmental preservation. In order to decentralize the optimal allocation under free trade, a social planner could implement a set of Lindahl prices together with an appropriate income redistribution policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106940"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143620001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shared lives, shared stress: Witnessing and spillover effects in spousal mental health interactions","authors":"Dain Jung ,&nbsp;Do Won Kwak ,&nbsp;Kam Ki Tang ,&nbsp;Myra Yazbeck","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106951","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106951","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The study examines the impact of significant events experienced by a partner on one’s mental health. It differentiates between the “witnessing effect” (direct observation of the partner’s events) and the “spillover effect” (mental health alterations mirrored from the partner). Contrary to past research, these effects are distinguished. We find that the strength of the witnessing effect varies by event type and gender, whereas the spillover effect is stable across events and genders. These findings highlight an oversight in previous research, which used exclusive partner events as instruments to estimate the spousal spillover effect without distinguishing it from the witnessing effect. The surprising finding of no gender bias in the spillover effect challenges the notion that women are more emotionally contagious. The findings suggest that the strong and gender-specific witnessing effect appears to outweigh the gender-neutral spillover effect in previous research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106951"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143620000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sexual orientation and financial well-being in the United States","authors":"Christopher S. Carpenter ,&nbsp;Kabir Dasgupta ,&nbsp;Zofsha Merchant ,&nbsp;Alexander Plum","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106967","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106967","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the relationship between financial well-being and sexual orientation using the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) data for 2019–2022. We document that sexual minorities (people who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual, or LGB) have significantly more difficulty managing financially than similarly situated heterosexual individuals—and this pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic. Differences are found across a broad array of current and future financial well-being outcomes, including retirement savings, rainy-day funds, credit card and schooling debts, and the use of alternative financial services such as payday loans. Differences in partnership, financial assistance from parents, financial knowledge, and risk preferences cannot explain these differences. Instead, we document that some social vulnerabilities, such as exposure to discriminatory behavior and violence, are differentially experienced by LGB people, which may play a role. Our results demonstrate that despite considerable improvements in attitudes and policies over time, sexual minorities in the United States experience significantly more financial insecurity than previously understood.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106967"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143610091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Institution formation in weakest-link games","authors":"Alejandro Caparrós ,&nbsp;Esther Blanco ,&nbsp;Michael Finus","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106943","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106943","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the role of endogenous formation of institutions in overcoming coordination failures in weakest-link games with fixed neighborhoods. In our setting, institutions are weak and only form and make decisions by unanimity. Experimental results show that such institutions are formed and mitigate the coordination problem, raising equilibrium provision levels, but falling short of providing Pareto-optimal contributions. Given the multiplicity of Nash equilibria in weakest-link games, we consider several equilibrium refinements that allow for (small) errors by individuals. Without institutions, risk dominance and the Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE) with (almost) perfectly rational agents select the worst equilibrium, while all equilibria are trembling-hand perfect and proper. With the possibility of forming an institution, all these concepts predict the Pareto-optimal equilibrium as the unique outcome. As we do not observe this outcome in our experimental results, only the Agent QRE model with bounded rationality can explain our data.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106943"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Green technology adoption under uncertainty, increasing returns, and complex adaptive dynamics","authors":"Sanjit Dhami ,&nbsp;Paolo Zeppini","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106953","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106953","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider firms’ choices between a clean technology that benefits, and a dirty technology that harms, the environment. Green firms are more suited to the clean technology and brown firms are more suited to the dirty technology. We use a model derived from complexity theory that takes account of true uncertainty and increasing returns to technology adoption. We examine theoretically, the properties of the long-run equilibrium, and provide simulated time paths of technology adoption, using plausible dynamics. The long-run outcome is an ‘emergent property’ of the system, and is unpredictable despite there being no external technological or preference shocks. We describe the role of taxes and subsidies in facilitating adoption of the clean technology; the conflict between optimal Pigouvian taxes and adoption of clean technologies; the optimal temporal profile of subsidies; and the desirability of an international fund to provide technology assistance to poorer countries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106953"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Correlation between upstreamness and downstreamness in random global value chains","authors":"Silvia Bartolucci ,&nbsp;Fabio Caccioli ,&nbsp;Francesco Caravelli ,&nbsp;Pierpaolo Vivo","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106945","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106945","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper is concerned with upstreamness and downstreamness of industries and countries in global value chains. Upstreamness and downstreamness measure respectively the average distance of an industrial sector from final consumption and from primary factors of production, and they are computed from the most used global Input–Output tables databases, e.g., the World Input–Output Database (WIOD). Recently, Antràs and Chor reported a puzzling and counter-intuitive finding in data from the period 1995-2011, namely that (at country level) upstreamness appears to be positively correlated with downstreamness, with a correlation slope close to <span><math><mrow><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></math></span>. This effect is stable over time and across countries, and it has been confirmed and validated by later analyses. We first analyze a simple model of random Input/Output tables, and we show that, under minimal and realistic structural assumptions, there is a natural positive correlation emerging between upstreamness and downstreamness of the same industrial sector/country, with correlation slope equal to <span><math><mrow><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></math></span>. This effect is robust against changes in the randomness of the entries of the I-O table and different aggregation protocols. Secondly, we perform experiments by randomly reshuffling the entries of the empirical I-O table where these puzzling correlations are detected, in such a way that the global structural constraints are preserved. Again, we find that the upstreamness and downstreamness of the same industrial sector/country are positively correlated with slope close to <span><math><mrow><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></math></span>, even though the random reshuffling has destroyed any underlying economic information about inter-sectorial connections and trends. Our results – rooted in the Complexity Science approach to economic problems – strongly suggest that (i) extra care is needed when interpreting these measures as simple representations of each sector’s positioning along the value chain, as the “curse of the input–output identities” and labor effects effectively force the value chain to acquire additional links from primary factors of production, and (ii) the empirically observed puzzling correlation may rather be a necessary consequence of the few structural constraints (positive entries, and sub-stochasticity) that Input/Output tables and their surrogates must meet, in turn making other proposed measures of sector inter-linkages more suitable and intuitive.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106945"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143552298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The evolution of partner preferences: Evidence using matrimonial ads from Canada, France, India and the United States","authors":"Quentin Lippmann ,&nbsp;Khushboo Surana","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106950","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106950","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using the text from matrimonial ads, we assemble a novel data set to describe the evolution of partner preferences over time and space. Analyzing ads published in Canada, France and India between 1950 and 1995, we show that stated preferences for economic criteria have fallen sharply in favor of personality traits in the two Western countries while they remain the most prevalent in India. Using ads covering various regions from the US and Canada in 1995, we show that personality traits are consistently more demanded than economic criteria. We provide evidence that these results are unlikely to be driven by the composition effects over time, role of parents or changing social norms. We show that the changes over time are particularly strong for women and accompany narrowing gender gaps in labor force participation in Western countries. We discuss the implications for understanding the evolution of assortative mating over time.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 106950"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143551820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religiosity and crime: Evidence from a city-wide shock","authors":"David Johnston ,&nbsp;Umair Khalil ,&nbsp;Wang-Sheng Lee ,&nbsp;Arijit Ray","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106934","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106934","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper estimates the impacts of religiosity on criminal activity using a city-wide shock to religious sentiment from a 2015 Papal visit. Using daily data on all reported offenses between 2010 and 2015 in Philadelphia at the census tract level and a difference-in-differences approach, we demonstrate significant reductions in less serious crimes in the week of the visit and for several weeks following. Reductions are particularly pronounced for drug offenses and in historically Christian areas. Notably, similar crime effects are not found for President Obama’s 2015 visit, suggesting changes in police deployment do not drive results.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 106934"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143548498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nature's impact: Do extreme natural disasters influence retail investors?","authors":"Mardy Chiah ,&nbsp;Xiao Tian ,&nbsp;Angel Zhong","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106954","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106954","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the influence of extreme natural disasters on the trading behaviour of retail investors, focusing on two significant events in Australia: Cyclone Debbie in 2017 and the Black Summer bushfires in 2019–2020. Utilising a unique dataset of transaction-level trade data, we examine whether retail investors exhibit a preference for trading stocks with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings during these periods. The findings reveal that retail investors significantly increase their trading activities in ESG-rated stocks (especially high ratings) in the aftermath of these disasters. This behaviour suggests a heightened awareness and preference for ESG performance among retail investors when faced with catastrophic events. In contrast, institutional investors do not show similar trading patterns, indicating a divergence in investment strategies between retail and institutional investors during times of heightened market uncertainty. Despite awareness concerning ESG during natural disasters, we find that ESG stocks heavily purchased by retail investors generate negative returns in the five-day window subsequent to the natural disasters.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 106954"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evaluating the effects of a low-cost, online financial education program","authors":"Robert L. Clark ,&nbsp;Chuanhao Lin ,&nbsp;Annamaria Lusardi ,&nbsp;Olivia S. Mitchell ,&nbsp;Andrea Sticha","doi":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106952","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106952","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We provide evidence on how a low-cost, online, and scalable financial education program influences older participants’ financial knowledge. We test the program using a field experiment that includes short stories covering three fundamental financial education topics: compound interest, risk diversification, and inflation. Two surveys are administered eight months apart to measure the effects of those stories on middle-aged and older (45+) participants' short-term and longer-term knowledge and financial behavior. We show that the risk diversification story is the most effective at improving participants' knowledge, in both the short and longer terms. In the short term, reading the risk diversification story significantly increased the likelihood of correctly answering the related knowledge questions by 17–18 percentage points. The compound interest and inflation stories significantly increase participant knowledge in the short term, but the gain in financial literacy declines over time. Furthermore, timestamp data was used to show that the inflation story increased the time participants spent answering the related knowledge questions suggesting that exposure to our story boosted participants’ attentiveness and interest in the topic. Over just an eight-month time period, the stories do not seem to have a significant effect on financial behaviors as measured by four financial distress indicators and a financial resilience index. Nevertheless, higher financial literacy is positively linked to better financial decision-making. The eight months might be too short to measure significant behavioral change; thus, further research is needed to prove the intervention's effect on financial behavior in the long run.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48409,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 106952"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}