Three essays in public economics

This thesis consists of three separate papers. In the first paper, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has measures of both risk preferences and religiosity along with measures of many risky behaviors, I investigate the implications of the correlations among risk preferences, religiosity and gender for the observed relationship of each of these variables with risky behaviors. I conclude that the correlations of risk preferences, religiosity, and gender with behaviors are all strongly robust to including the others in the regression; although they are correlated, they have independent relationships with risky behaviors. The second paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment to study the impact of choice in charitable giving; in this experiment half of the recipients of a newsletter from a Dutch NGO were able to choose what program area their donation would be spent on. There is no difference in either mean response rates or mean donation amounts between the treatment and control groups; I thus conclude that while most of the treatment group in this experiment did not value the choice that they were given, the choice also did not make them any less likely to donate.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Siegel, Sarah Y

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan Gruber.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37406

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37406