Deciding to Decide: Gender, Leadership and Risk-Taking in Groups

Being the leader in a group often involves making risky decisions that affect the payoffs of all members, and the decision to take this responsibility in a group is endogenous in many contexts. In this paper, we experimentally study: (1) the willingness of men and women to make risky decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the amount of risk men and women take for the group, in comparison to their individual decisions. We observe a striking difference between males and females, with a much lower fraction of women being willing to make the group decision than men. The amount of risk taken for the group is generally lower than in the case where subjects decide for themselves only, indicating a cautious shift. The women that would like to make the group decision and the women that do not are no different in terms of how much risk they take for themselves, nor for their group. For men, on the other hand, we find that the ones who would like to lead tend to take more risk on behalf of the group. We also present several results on the relationship of risk-taking and leadership decisions with personality traits.Conditional CAPM

The Baby Boom, Baby Busts, and Grandmothers

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to assess the fertility implications of the fluctuations in both output (as argued by demographers) and grandmother-availability induced child-care costs over the period 1920-1970. Model does a good job of mimicking the bust-boom-bust pattern during this period. When the child-care cost channel is shut down, the model’s performance weakens significantly; in particular, it fails to capture the bust in the 1960’s altogether.fertility, baby boom, baby bust, female labor-force participation, grandmother availability

Truth-telling and Trust in Sender-receiver Games with Intervention

Recent experimental studies find excessive truth-telling in strategic information transmission games with conflictive preferences. In this paper, we show that this phenomenon is more pronounced in sender-receiver games where a truthful regulator randomly intervenes. We also establish that intervention significantly increases the excessive trust of receivers.Strategic information transmission, truth-telling, trust, sender-receiver game.

Religion, Income Inequality, and the Size of the Government

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial sacrifices and this leads the religious to prefer making their contributions voluntarily rather than through mandatory means. To the extent that citizen preferences are reflected in policy outcomes, religiosity results in lower taxes, which in turn implies lower levels of spending on both public goods and redistribution. Since measures of income typically do not fully take into account the part of income coming from donations received, this increases measured income inequality. We formalize these ideas in a general equilibrium political economy model and also show that the implications of our model are supported by cross-country data.religion, voluntary donations, taxation, redistribution, income inequality

An experimental study of the investment implications of bankruptcy laws

In bankruptcy laws, proportionality is the universal norm when allocating the liquidation value of a bankrupt firm among creditors. The theoretical literature on bankruptcy proposes two prominent alternatives to proportionality: the equal awards and the equal losses principles. We use an experiment to analyze and compare actual creditor behavior under these three principles. More specifically, we test the following hypotheses: replacing proportionality with equal losses increases total investment while replacing proportionality with equal awards decreases total investment; under all three principles individual investment choices decrease in response to an increase in the probability of bankruptcy or an increase in risk aversion; total investment difference between proportionality and either of the other two principles is independent of the probability of bankruptcy as long as both induce an interior equilibrium. The results of the nonparametric tests and random effects Tobit regression analyses we conduct on our experimental data offer support for all hypotheses

The Perceived Country Of Origin Images In Turkey

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of country-of-origin image in quality perceptions of Turkish consumers. Since the research already supports the fact that country-of-origin image reflects a consumer’s general perception about the quality of products made in a particular country and the nature of people from that country, the authors aimed to search how consistent the Turkish consumers are in perceiving some products/product groups and the countries those products are associated with. The objective is to assess the matching of perceptions of some country images and the products. Both the product-country and the country-product match information can be used to assess consumers’ purchase intentions by both marketing practitioners and the state authorities in managing country images. This study examined country-of-origin in terms of the fit between countries and product categories as perceived by a sample of 500 students/professionals in both major universities and numerous business institutions in Turkey. The findings indicated that the respondents were not consistent in associating the names of the products and the names of the countries with each other

DNA barcoding and phylogenetic analysis of endemic Astragalus nezaketiae and Vicia alpestris subsp. hypoleuca (Fabaceae): Evidence from nrDNA ITS and cpDNA matK and rbcL sequences

In this study, we performed DNA barcoding and phylogenetic analysis using one nuclear (ITS) and two chloroplast DNA regions (matK and rbcL) of endemic Astragalus nezaketiae A. Duran & Aytaçand Vicia alpestris Stev. subsp. hypoleuca (Boiss.) Davis taxa in Turkey. PCR reactions were performed using universal primers. Sequences of the PCR products were edited using BioEdit and FinchTV software and contigs were obtained. All contigs were Blasted at NCBI and similarities were analysed. Using the MEGA 6.0 program, maximum likelihood trees were constructed including some sequences retrieved from NCBI. For Astragalus nezaketiae; in the ITS analysis, Astragalus nezaketiae appeared separately from other species, and for matK, Astragalus nezaketiae appeared together with Astragalus cicer L. However, rbcL tree was polytomic. For Vicia alpestris subsp. hypoleuca; in ITS, rbcL and matK results Vicia alpestris subsp. hypoleuca were found together with Vicia cracca L., Vicia benghalensis L. and Vicia villosa Roth species. Analysis of the combined data revealed similar results with all barcode regions for Vicia alpestris subsp. hypoleuca while different phylogenetic results were obtained for Astragalus nezaketiae