Abstrakt
In the first chapter, I examine the effect of scarcity on sharing norms and preferences. Sharing provides one of few sources of insurance in poor communities.
It gains prominence during adverse shocks, often largely aggregate, when it is also costliest for individuals to share. In the second chapter, we study how the availability and use of a specific formal institution-- a financial sanction -- affects trust, trustworthiness, and moral intentions towards co-ethnics and non-co-ethnics using an economic experiment run with 420 adult males from peri-urban areas in Afghanistan.
In contrast to previous studies on the behavioral effects of financial incentives, our subjects have little experience with formal institutions. In the third chapter, we integrate tools to monitor information acquisition in field experiments on discrimination and examine whether gaps arise already when decision-makers choose the effort level for reading an application.
In both of the countries we study, negatively stereotyped minority names reduce employers' effort to inspect resumes. In contrast, minority names increase information acquisition in the rental housing market.
Both results are consistent with a model of endogenous allocation of costly attention, which magnifies the role of prior beliefs and preferences beyond the one considered in standard models of discrimination.