Does the exposure to natural hazards affect risk and time preferences? Some insights from a field experiment in Perú

Mohamed Ali Bchir and Marc Willinger

Working Papers from LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier

Abstract: We report the results of an experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good in which we implement a redistribution of the group endowment among group members in a lump sum manner. We study the impact of redistribution on group contribution, on individuals’ contribu- tions according to their endowment and on welfare. Our experimental results show that welfare increases when equality is broken, as predicted by theory (Itaya, De Meza & Myles, 1997), because the larger contribution of the rich subjects overcompensates the lower contribution of the poor subjects. Last but not least, agents’ behavior in situations of inequality of income, depends on initial conditions. In particular, the decisions of those who become poor seem to express a form of protest against the new distribution of incomes compared to those who started out as poor: from a behavioral point of view, being poor is therefore not equivalent to becoming poor.

Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2013-03, Revised 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lameta.univ-montp1.fr/Documents/DR2013-04.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.lameta.univ-montp1.fr:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lam:wpaper:13-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patricia Modat ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).