The economics of inequality
On Tuesday 24. September 2019 Ranveig Falch will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
The economics of inequality: Behavioral insights
Trial lecture:
10:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Title of the thesis:
Essays on Inequality Acceptance
Summary:
The thesis consists of three chapters, which informs highly relevant policy debates by examining which inequalities people find morally acceptable, and how preferences for inequalities are shaped.
The first chapter relates to the “boy crisis” by examining whether people find it more acceptable when males fall behind, than when females do. Based on a large-scale experiment with a general population sample of over 3,000 Americans, we provide strong evidence of a gender bias against low-performing males. Our results suggests that the gender bias reflects statistical fairness discrimination. The chapter provides novel evidence on the nature of discrimination and on how males falling behind are perceived by society.
The second chapter reports from the first experiment designed to elicit people's preferences for the distribution of educational resources in society. It examines how a general population sample of over 2,000 Americans trade off educational resources between quick and slow learners. Falch finds that they give priority to slow learners, assigning, on average, two thirds of the resources to this group.
Using treatment manipulations, she finds that both cost efficiency and the relative motivations of the learners causally affect the resource allocations, but the priority given to slow learners remains.
The third chapter sheds light on how inequality acceptance in society may be transmitted from one generation to the next by documenting systematic differences in how adults handle distributive conflicts among children in two societies characterized by very different levels of income inequality, China (Shanghai) and Norway. In a large-scale experiment, including over 6000 adults, we find a striking country difference, where adults in China implement more than twice as much income inequality between children, compared to adults in Norway making the same type of distributive decisions.
Defense:
12:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Kjell Gunnar Salvanes (leader of the committee), Department of Economics and FAIR, NHH
Professor Matthias Sutter, Max Planck Institute
Professor Anna Dreber Almenberg, Stockholm School of Economics
Supervisors:
Professor Bertil Tungodden (main supervisor), Department of Economics and FAIR, NHH
Professor Uri Gneezy, University of California, San DiegoThe trial lecture and thesis defence will be open to the public.