Abstracts WS 2023/24
31. Januar 2024
Prof. Martin Ivanov, PhD (Sofia University and CAS Sofia)
Title: "Did Living Standards Actually Improve Under State Socialism? Evidence From Bulgaria 1924-1989"
Abstract: This paper challenge the view that Centrally Planned Economies functioned well until the early 1970s, delivering high economic growth and better living standards. As part of a broader research effort into living standards under state socialism, it focuses on real wages and nutritional evidence. Judged by these yardsticks, it was only in the 1970s when the living standards in Bulgarian countryside surpass the levels achieved already four decades earlier. Our findings are particularly discomforting for the rural population which was the big loser of collectivization and forced industrialization policies after 1946. Big Push industrialization reduced nutritional welfare in addition to coming at high human and societal cost.
31. Januar 2024
Prof. Erik O. Kimbrough, PhD (Chapman University); Prof. Shachar Kariv, PhD (UC Berkeley)
Title: "Revealed Norms"
When individuals make social choices involving tradeoffs between their own self-interest and the interests of others, their choices are difficult to interpret. Do they reflect altruism, inequality aversion, reputational concerns, etc? We suggest that we can empirically isolate the normative influences on peoples' choices by focusing on disinterested third-party decisions on behalf of anonymous others. In these environments, choices can be understood as revealing normative principles (norms) rather than preferences. If people are not simply indifferent, then their choices must be motivated by normative considerations. We show that third-party allocations across 50 randomly generated budget sets tend to satisfy the basic axioms of consistent choice, revealing a widely shared norm of symmetric treatment but heterogeneous views about what kind of symmetric allocation is normatively best, ranging from maximin to max(efficiency). When subjects choose from the same budget sets but have a stake in the outcome, their choices reveal the extent to which self-interest causes them to deviate from their revealed norms. We show how to non-parametrically estimate the weight placed on norms.