Gender Beliefs and Cooperation in a Public Goods game Experiment

We study the role of gender beliefs for cooperation in a public goods game experiment. Controlling for risk preferences and for subjects’ unconditional willingness to cooperate, we find that gender beliefs affect behavior in homogenous groups where the group composition was announced

De keukentafel en de keukendeur – klassenverschillen in de verdeling van huishoudelijke arbeid

In the Netherlands, the redistribution of unpaid housework from women to men is very limited, despite the fact that women’s labour force participation and level of education has increased significantly over the past decade. We use the feminist economic household bargaining approach to analyse male partners’ contribution to housework, with primary data from heterosexual couples. We collected the data from two mutually exclusive groups who either supply or demand paid household services through two online agencies. The results show that for the lower class households (those supplying services) men do more unpaid housework when their female partner earns a relatively high income. For the higher class households (those demanding services) we find no such effect for women’s income. Instead, we find that when men earn relatively high incomes they reduce their contribution to housework. Moreover, we find that with a higher family income, more paid household services are hired. We conclude that for the lower class, income insecurity seems to stimulate men to do more housework, allowing women to do more paid work, whereas for the higher class, more personal and more family income appears to be an escape for men from doing more housework

Assumption without representation: the unacknowledged abstraction from communities and social goods

We have not clearly acknowledged the abstraction from unpriceable “social goods” (derived from communities) which, different from private and public goods, simply disappear if it is attempted to market them. Separability from markets and economics has not been argued, much less established. Acknowledging communities would reinforce rather than undermine them, and thus facilitate the production of social goods. But it would also help economics by facilitating our understanding of – and response to – financial crises as well as environmental destruction and many social problems, and by reducing the alienation from economics often felt by students and the public