This article lists the NEA board's main accomplishments during the period from February 2023 to January 2024 as summarized in my farewell letter to the NEA membership (sent on January 31, 2024).
In this presidential address, I discuss findings from a survey that was sent to all living past presidents ([Formula: see text]) of the National Economic Association (NEA). Based on 14 responses, I discuss potential strategies and action items for future NEA boards to consider. This text was spoken aloud during the presidential address.
"This study reports theory-testing laboratory experiments on the effect of yardstick competition on corruption. The results reveal that on the incumbent's side, yardstick competition acts as a corruption-taming mechanism only if the incumbent politician is female. On the voter's side, voters focus on the difference between the tax rate in their own jurisdiction versus that in another jurisdiction. If the voters' tax rate is deemed unfair compared to that in the other jurisdiction, voters are less likely to re-elect. These findings support the claim by Besley and Case (1995) that incumbent behavior and tax setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition, suggesting that our laboratory experiments have some external validity." -- from Author's Abstract ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; GRP23 ; MTID
We review select literature on racial and ethnic disparities in retirement outcomes in the United States and the impact of outreach on such outcomes. First, there are significant disparities in retirement outcomes, reflecting a long history of racism and structural barriers. Second, there is comparatively little work on the differential impact of retirement outreach across race and ethnicity. Future work should consider designing interventions that cater to the needs of specific demographic groups, for example, by embracing the fact that Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites acquire retirement information from different sources. Future work should also incorporate behavioral insights, particularly from prior interventions, and innovate on methodologies for data collection, linking, and analysis.
Competitive bonuses are commonly used to promote higher productivity in the workplace. Yet, these types of incentives can have subsequent negative spillovers on coworkers' prosocial behavior. We revisit this question in a lab-in-the-field experiment and examine whether competition negatively affects Social Value Orientation (prosocial attitudes) in addition to contributions to a public good (cooperative behavior). By considering the context of a developing country, we contribute to replicating previous findings in White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) samples. We find that when the payment dispersion between winners and losers is high, competition reduces both cooperation and prosocial attitudes compared to a threshold payment. Mainly winners cooperate less under competition. A comparison with a random payment scheme suggests that rivalry might partly explain the crowding-out effect in other-regarding preferences. Under low payment dispersion, competition does not affect cooperation or prosocial attitudes.
This article discusses some of the lessons that our multidisciplinary team (spanning Economics, Education, Psychology, and Sociology) learned from implementing randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to assess the impact of metacognitive training on outcomes of Black female college students. Because our data collection is ongoing, the purpose of this article is to describe the collaborative efforts required to make such a project a success and share lessons learned. Future papers will focus on the quantitative findings of the RCTs by looking at the impacts on outcomes such as metacognitive awareness, grade point average, and retention.