Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city

Silvia Angerer, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, Philipp Lergetporer and Matthias Sutter

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the affiliation to a specific language group affects behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game and leads to discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year old primary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generally increases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members and cooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and develops with age. This gap is due to both in-group favoritism and language group discrimination. While the former is persistent across all age groups and both language groups and accounts for most of the discrimination observed, the latter only emerges in later years of primary school among children belonging to the German language group. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Published in European Economic Review 90(2016): pp. 254-264

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city (2016)
Working Paper: Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city (2015)
Working Paper: Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city (2015)
Working Paper: Cooperation and Discrimination Within and Across Language Borders: Evidence from Children in a Bilingual City (2015)
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:lmu:muenar:43473

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics Ludwigstr. 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().