Selfish and Indoctrinated Economists?

Bruno Frey and Stephan Meier

No 103, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Many people believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this greater selfishness is due to economics education. This paper offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set on giving behaviour in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people act more selfishly. Rather, this natural experiment suggests that the particular behaviour of economists can be explained by a selection effect.

Keywords: Economists; Public Good; Giving Behaviour; Education; Selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A20 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-pbe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (148)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52003/1/iewwp103.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Selfish and Indoctrinated Economists? (2005)
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:zur:iewwpx:103

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().