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Publications (38)
Bribes are gifts that are given with an expectation of favourable treatment from a public official or an authority figure. In some cultures, gift giving is a widely accepted part of social interaction and the rejection of gifts may be frowned upon. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether and how the (in)ability to reject gifts/bribes...
In this paper we present the results of a field experiment on encouraging farmers' application for agri-environmental schemes, specifically the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) that is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the state level. We sent different versions of a recruitment/enrollment letter to agricultural producers...
This paper investigates the role of property rights in environmental decisions and choices regarding the distribution of income in a downstream water pollution problem. The results confirm that who owns the property rights is a significant determinant of these decisions. More specifically, under certain conditions a property rights owner who suffer...
Environmental problems coupled with shrinking budgets for environmental agencies call for alternative strategies to improve the effectiveness of current and future environmental policies. Empathy conservation promises such an alternative approach. In this paper we summarize the findings from previous research testing various propositions of metaeco...
Currently, male principal operators predominate the farming industry. However, the number of female operators is increasing. Hoppe and Korb (2013) reported the share of farms headed by females increased from 5.2% in 1978 to 13.9% in 2007. According to the US 2007 census, there were 300,000 principle female operators and about 700,000 secondary fema...
Leading up to the 2014 Farm Bill, the House of Representatives and the Senate proposed alternative changes to the incentive structure for farmer conservation efforts. While both include crop insurance subsidies, the version proposed by the Senate made such subsidies conditional on conservation efforts. This study uses experimental methods to analyz...
Experimental economics research shows that gender can often explain some of the variation in individual behavior in experiments. This is especially true for contextualized games (corruption, environmental protection) in which participants’ behavior is guided by homegrown values and predispositions. We examine the gender differences in environmental...
This article summarizes our experimental research testing the metaeconomics framework (MEF) and dual-interest theory (DIT), which suggests an im-portant and substantive role for empathy in the design of conservation policy to achieve sustaina-bility (for more detail, see http://agecon-cpanel.unl.edu/lynne/metaecon/Lynneetal2014TragedyCommons.pdf )...
Environmental policies representing traditional economic framing are typically designed using predicted behavior of a representative consumer, without consideration of personality differences. The experience of the business community suggests, however, that accounting for individual differences (heterogeneity) cannot only give better understanding,...
Common-pool resources and other shared resources frequently suffer from overextraction/overuse and associated negative externalities. In this paper we design a framed laboratory experiment on downstream water pollution to investigate (a) the importance of empathy vs. self-interest framing in determining the behavior of upstreamers regarding the neg...
One of the concerns in environmental and ecological economics is the overexploitation of natural resources, often leading to pollution. Proponents of market based solutions to these pollution problems argue that one only needs to move away from common property (the way almost all natural resources, other than land, are owned now), to individual pro...
Current and past farming practices have led to significant environmental degradation in the form of soil erosion (sediments), as well as fertilizer and chemical related water pollution. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has long tried to implement policies to temper such negative effects on the environment. The 2008 Farm Bill which...
In this article we continue discussing our vision for appealing to other than self-interest-only (profit maximization) in public policies on conservation of farming land. We look specifically at the downstream water pollution problem (i.e. agricultural practices of upstream farmers leading to soil erosion and chemical/fertilizer runoff, which resul...
This paper further tests dual interest theory and the metaeconomics approach to environmental choice, recognizing a possible role for empathy–sympathy (the basis for an internalized, shared other-interest) in tempering and conditioning the more fundamental tendency to pursue self-interest. To test, we focus on rivers flowing through agricultural ar...
There is a great deal of discussion on the effectiveness of public policies relating to intervention of government into the affairs of people. Some believe in “the invisible hand of the market,” while others call for active involvement of the government. Yet both sides tend to agree that in the case where markets fail to deal with too much pollutio...
The recent empirical literature on corruption has identified a long list of variables that correlate significantly with corruption but only five were distinguished by Leamer’s Extreme Bounds Analysis as robust to various samples, measures of corruption, and regression specifications. Among these five factors that were found to reduce corruption are...
This paper develops a model for a particular type of grand corruption often encountered in developing countries, namely, the sale of government positions by autocratic rulers. A two-stage game is considered, where the autocrat moves first to maximize his revenue from the sale of positions in the cabinet by choosing a price that must be paid by inte...
Contributions to environmental goods are motivated by both pecuniary incentives and environmental consciousness. Public policy often uses financial incentives to encourage contributions. However, individuals often donate their time or money to the environmental cause without such incentives. The purpose of this paper is: (a) to examine the relation...
The problem of shared resources, especially Common Pool Resources (CPRs), has been studied extensively. In such cases (e.g. aquifers), if the users are driven solely by self-interest and do not cooperate/coordinate their actions, over-extraction occurs. However, over the years many researchers (e.g. Ostrom, 2010) have found that users are not alway...
The recent empirical literature on corruption has identified a long list of variables that correlate significantly with various measures of corruption. Several of these variables, namely income per capita, mainly Protestant population, colonial heritage, decades-long tradition of democratic institutions, and political instability were distinguished...
The notion that something beyond money could also be an important part of economic choice goes back hundreds of years. Adam Smith, who is credited with providing the framework for modern market-based economies, wrote extensively in the late 1700s about the role of the “moral sentiments.” In fact, his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments was actually...
In the beginning of the 1990s, the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began reforming their economies. Yet despite two decades of research, it is still unclear which reform path – gradual or radical – is better for long-run growth. Unlike most other studies on the topic, which concentrate on the growth of output per c...
Common-pool resources and other shared resources frequently suffer from overextraction/overuse and associated negative externalities. In this paper we design a framed laboratory experiment on downstream water pollution to investigate (a) the importance of framing in determining the behavior of upstreamers regarding the negative externalities, and (...
This paper explores the determinants of revealed environmental concern. Specifically, the model proposed in this paper examines the connection between the willingness to sacrifice monetary well-being to support the environment and stated environmental concern, psychological predispositions, socio-economic and demographic characteristics, and pecuni...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of voting and excludability on individual contributions to group projects. We conducted two experiments on excludable and nonexcludable public goods, which provided several important results. First, contrary to our expectations, subjects are generally contributing more to the non-excludable com...
In this paper we demonstrate the use of Genetic Algorithms in the selection of significant variables from a large set of available variables used to explain the observed behavior of subjects in an economic experiment. Standard regression analysis requires assumptions on a functional form and may thus prevent us from finding all relevant relationshi...
We conducted two experiments in the context of environmental protection. We found that profit considerations and personality traits are among the essential determinants of individual contributions to the solution of environmental problems. The results show that environmental considerations are powerful motivators and subjects are willing to forgo p...
This dissertation consists of three essays dealing with international trade, technological spillovers and growth. The first essay is concerned with the effect of trade liberalization on economic growth. Different from other papers in this literature a Malmquist estimation procedure is applied on a set of 150 countries. A smoothed bootstrapping proc...
This paper examines the validity of anti-trade arguments that are based on the absence of technological spillovers. Results of a pooled cross-section time-series analysis for developing countries fail to support the existence of technological spillovers. Findings of learning-by-doing effects indicate that protectionism might be beneficial under cer...
This paper further tests dual interest theory and the metaeconomics approach to environmental choice, recognizing a possible role for empathy-sympathy (the basis for an internalized, shared other-interest) in tempering and conditioning the more fundamental tendency to pursue self-interest. To test, we focus on rivers flowing through agricultural ar...
