Historical Inequality and Mobility in Norway
On Friday 29 November 2024 Eirik Berger Abel will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Understanding Stress and Redistributive Choice
On Monday 11 November 2024 Ingvild Skarpeid will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Ingvild Lindgren Skarpeid’ s PhD thesis investigates two crucial issues in economic decision-making: the impact of stress on behavior and the role of redistributive preferences in shaping income inequality. By combining lab-based and online experiments, her work spans diverse populations, including low-income individuals in Nairobi, Kenya, and a representative sample of Americans.
Many of the world's poor are entrepreneurs who often must make decisions about whether to compete with others. At the same time, people often make decisions under stress, and this is especially true for the poor, who often experience high exposure to stress. The first paper shows that stress reduces competitiveness in men, in a lab experiment on urban poor population in Nairobi. The findings from the controlled lab environment suggest that stress does not improve decision-making, highlighting potential barriers to entrepreneurship in low-income settings.
The second paper explores gender differences in performing under pressure: It has been suggested that a fundamental reason behind men outperforming women on examinations is choking under pressure. To date, there is no direct evidence that choking causes underperformance in test-taking, nor that women are more impacted than men. We put this to the test in a randomized experiment, in a large-scale experiment and find that the increase in pressure does not significantly impact average performance, neither for the pooled sample nor differentially for women. However, an exploratory analysis reveals that the large incentives reduce performance among a subset of female test takers who, based on findings in previous literature, are "at risk" of choking. Our insights highlight the importance of investigating how pressure may differentially impact gender and minorities in high-stakes environments.
The final paper examines how Americans differentiate between inequality arising from talent versus luck, despite talent being at least partly a lucky draw in the "genetic lottery". The study shows that people are more tolerant of inequality linked to talent, as it is viewed as partially under individual control. This distinction sheds light on public attitudes towards inequality and the fairness of economic outcomes, with implications for the policy debates on meritocracy.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
Decision Quality in the Hot versus Cold State: Causal Evidence from Empirical Studies and Reflections on Research Validity
Trial lecture:
Karl Borch
Title of the thesis:
Understanding Stress and Redistributive Choice: Evidence from Three Economic Experiments
Defense:
Karl Borch
Members of the evaluation committee:
Assistant Professor Heidi Christina Thysen (leader of the commitee), Department of Economics, NHH
Associate Professor Åshild Auglænd Johnsen, OsloMet
Assistant Professor Ian Levely, King’s College London
Supervisor:
Professor Erik Ø. Sørensen, Department of Economics and FAIR, NHH
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.
Three essays on conflict and ethnic tensions
On Tuesday 22 October 2024 Monica Beeder will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.