Social Information and Gender Differences in Competitive Preferences

This is an exploratory study that examines the effect of social information on gender differences in selection into a winner-take-all tournament, using a simple addition task. Participants perform this task in multiple rounds and then select into a competitive or non-competitive pay scheme. Prior to choosing payment schemes, participants are shown selected results about average performance and choices in a similar experiment. I find that the inclusion of social information eliminates any extant gender gap in competitive choices in every treatment. The reduction in the gender gap is not due to greater efficiency of choices by men or women, even though inefficient choices by low-performing individuals are mostly eliminated. Rather, the inclusion of feedback causes men and women to select into a competitive pay scheme in a similar manner, thereby removing the gender gap. Despite these results, the complexity of the social information intervention used leaves some results unexplained. JEL Codes: C9, J2, J16.

Cruising Through School: General Equilibrium Effects of Cruise Ship Arrivals on Employment and Education

Cruise tourism is the fastest-growing branch of the tourism sector, and many have turned to it as a development strategy despite little systematic evidence of its equilibrium effects. I match 10.6 million automatic identification system (AIS) locations from 517 cruise ships arriving in 265 port destinations to 355,463 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) women’s surveys in 23 countries to estimate cruise tourism’s relationship with women’s labor market participation and educational attainment. Using fixed effects to identify changes in tourism over time, I estimate that doubling cruise ship arrivals is associated with a 4.9-percentage point increase in labor participation and one-quarter more years of education. These results would be consistent with port cities offering more job opportunities for older women and increased opportunity and available income for education, possibly in anticipation of improved employment prospects.

Club Formation and Response To Natural Disaster: An Example From South Carolina

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused approximately 10 billion dollars of damage in the United States and nearly 350 million dollars in South Carolina. The historic rainfall damaged or completely destroyed roads, bridges, buildings, crops, and dams. This paper documents how one small lakefront community in eastern South Carolina formed a de facto Buchanan Club to fund the reconstruction of a dam destroyed by Matthew and restore a small lake, an exemplary club good. This private response was needed because both the Federal and State governments declined public assistance. In the end and roughly approximately two years after Matthew, the dam was repaired and the lake refilled with the rainfall of Hurricane Florence.

Teaching Methods in Undergraduate Intermediate Theory, Statistics and Econometrics, and Other Upper-Division Economics Courses: Results From a Sixth National Quinquennial Survey

This article is an extension of a recent article published in The American Economist (Asarta et al., 2021) and presents the second report of basic findings from the 2020 online administration of the sixth national quinquennial survey on teaching and assessment methods in economics. Consistent with the results from the first report, we find that “chalk and talk” remains the staple method of instruction across the entire undergraduate economics curriculum. Lessons, activities, and references that address diversity, inclusion, or gender issues are almost never used in intermediate theory, statistics and econometrics, and other upper-division field courses. There has been notable growth in the use of cooperative learning/small-group assignments, as well as in instructor-led and “student(s) with student(s)” discussions over the past 25 years. Overall, however, there have been minimal changes in teaching methods over time.JEL Classifications: A20, A22