Published papers

Family life in lockdown. Frontiers in Psychology, 12(687570), 3259, 2021. (with Pietro Biroli, Marina Della Giusta, Amalia Di Girolamo, Sylvia Jaworska, and Jeremy Vollen)
Economic, social and political fragmentation: Linking knowledge-biased growth, identity, populism & protectionism. European Journal of Political Economy, 67, 101965, 2021. (with Dennis Snower)
Navigating motivation: A semantic and subjective atlas of 7 motives. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(568064), 2021. (with Marisa Przyrembel, Gabriele Chierchia, Franca Parianen Lesemann, Dennis Snower and Tania Singer)
Bias and discrimination: What do we know?. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36(4), 925-943, 2020. (with Marina Della Giusta)
Motives and comprehension in a Public Goods game with induced emotions. Theory and Decision, 86(2), 205-238, 2019. (with Simon Bartke, Dennis Snower, and Gabriele Chierchia)
The importance of higher-order beliefs to successful coordination. Experimental Economics, 20(1), 237-258, 2017.
Identity-driven cooperation versus competition. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 106(5), 420-424, 2016. (with Dennis Snower)
Cooperation, motivation and social balance. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 126(B), 72-94, 2016. (with Dennis Snower & Tania Singer)
Overconfidence, incentives and digit ratio. Scientific Reports, 23294, 2016. (with Levent Neyse, Patrick Ring & Ulrich Schmidt)
Nudging als politisches Instrument — gute Absicht oder staatlicher Übergriff?. Wirtschaftsdienst 94(11), 2014, 767–791. (with Simon Bartke)
Social capital and equilibrium selection in Stag Hunt games. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39, 2013, 11–20.

Selected working papers

Parental time investments and instantaneous well-being in the United States. (with Almudena Sevilla and Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal) 

• What explains the positive association between mothers’ education and the time they spend with their children? Leading explanations center around an assumption, unsupported by direct evidence, that education increases the marginal productivity of investing in children’s human capital. We furthermore use the Well-being Modules of the American Time Use Survey to rule out a hedonic explanation. Despite spending about 20 minutes more in childcare per day, higher educated mothers report lower levels of instantaneous well-being than less-educated mothers, during child-related activities. Our results hold after controlling for a wide set of cofounders, including overall life satisfaction. We instead advance an identity economics model of "intensive mothering" to explain these findings. Mothers with higher education relative to a reference group select into placing high value on human capital outcomes. This identity confers high social prestige but requires costly time investments to credibly signal children’s human capital.

Organisational ethics, narratives, and social dysfunction. (with Dennis Snower)

• This paper explores the joint determination of economic output, wages, corporate culture, employees' ethical standards and monitoring intensity in an analysis of organisational dysfunction. Economic activities are frequently accompanied by unethical and socially harmful activity, such as corruption, sexual harassment and environmental degradation. The ethical sensitivities of managers and their employees are shaped through their social interactions and thus organisational dysfunctions can arise. Such dysfunctions may be mitigated through changes in government policies or social norms. These changes become particularly effective if they encourage the managers and employees to adopt more ethical narratives. Narratives align managers' and employees' recognition of the social harm from unethical activities, determining their objectives and thereby their economic behaviours. The intersubjective quality of narratives means that policy interventions may either be amplified or counteracted by how discussion unfolds around the issue.
  
  

Technological advance, social fragmentation, and welfare. (with Dennis Snower)

• This paper models the welfare consequences of social fragmentation arising from technological advance. We start from the premise that technological progress falls primarily on market-traded commodities rather than prosocial relationships, since the latter intrinsically require the expenditure of time and thus are less amenable to productivity increases. Since prosocial relationships require individuals to identify with others in their social group whereas marketable commodities are commonly the objects of social status comparisons, a tradeoff arises between in-group affiliation and inter-group status comparisons. People consequently narrow the bounds of their social groups, reducing their prosocial relationships and extending their status-seeking activities. As prosocial relationships generate positive externalities whereas status-seeking activities generate negative preference externalities, technological advance may lead to a particular type of “decoupling” of social welfare from material prosperity. Once the share of status goods in total production exceeds a crucial threshold, technological advance is shown to be welfare-reducing.

Higher education fees as signals.

• This paper argues that the fees paid for a degree may reveal private information about ability. In contrast with traditional signalling models, degrees need not be costlier for low-ability workers to acquire. This result follows when the labour market learns workers’ types with delay, but only if their job requires high ability. Fees induce a separating equilibrium when they exceed the benefit of a low ability worker “passing” as high ability early in their career, but are less than the life cycle penalty which high ability types would suffer from failing to signal. Raising fees in this setting exacerbates rather than ameliorates inefficient credentialing.
  

Relative performance and innovation: Implications for mergers. (with Minyan Zhu)

• There is an active debate in the innovation literature regarding the impact of market concentration on incentives for firms to innovate. When mergers leave firms with multiple products in the same market, they may not want successful product developments to cannibalise their other products’ demand. Existing models suggest that this cannibalisation effect is strong enough to reduce total R&D investment in markets following a merger. We show that the cannibalisation effect is mitigated when managers face relative performance incentives, since a merged firm’s successful new products, in diverting rival firms’ sales, also improve the relative position of their existing products against those rivals. Using parameters in line with the literature, we show merged firms’ investment strategies becoming more aggressive, with mergers increasing overall R&D.

DIY or ask someone nice?: Nudging against gender stereotypes in helping behaviour. (with Sophie Clot and Marina Della Giusta)

• We design an experiment to assess the effect of gender stereotypes on the selection of whom in a group to carry out a volunteering task. Subjects’ group members are described to them using cartoons depicting women and men displaying different emotional states: happy, neutral or unhappy. We experimentally vary the salience of gender stereotypes by eliciting views on a set of gender-related questions from social attitudes surveys either immediately before or after volunteering intentions. Women offer to volunteer more than men, and while neither the emotional affect or the gender of the nominated person per se influence delegation, men are more likely to choose the happy female face when gender stereotypes are not salient. Priming gender stereotypes increases volunteering among all, but the treatment effect differs across genders: Men nominate fewer women when primed to think about gender. This effect is stronger for men reporting more traditional gender views. Women primed to think about gender nominate fewer women and fewer men, never nominate the neutral woman, and nominate the happy woman more often the less traditional gender attitudes they have.

Cross-task spillovers in workplace teams: Motivation vs. learning. (with Simon Bartke)

• We study an experimental setting designed to measure non-strategic behavioural spillovers and elucidate their mechanisms. In our setup a principal can observe the individual efforts of two agents in one task but can only observe team effort in another. We vary the availability of piece rate, tournament, team piece rate, and fixed wage contracts for the individually observable task while holding fixed the use of a team pay contract for the task where only team output is observable. We find tournament incentives unexpectedly induce high voluntary effort in the unobservable task, but that this is exclusively driven by cross-task advantageous learning overriding its deleterious effects on pro-social motivation. We therefore see our study as integrating diverse findings into a coherent explanation: Competitive incentives crowd out pro-social motivation, team incentives promote pro-social motivation, but setting a high effort precedent may be more important when employees perceive tasks as related.