Abi Adams

For Love or Reward? Characterising Preferences for Giving to Parents in an Experimental Setting

Understanding the motivations behind intergenerational transfers is an important and active research area in economics. The existence and responsiveness of familial transfers have consequences for the design of intra and intergenerational redistributive programmes, particularly as such programmes may crowd out private transfers amongst altruistic family members. Yet, despite theoretical and empirical advances in this area, significant gaps in our knowledge remain. In this article, we advance the current literature by shedding light on both the motivation for providing intergenerational transfers, and on the nature of preferences for such giving behaviour, by using experimental techniques and revealed preference methods.

When Home Affects Pay: An Analysis of the Gender Pay Gap Among Crowdworkers

Debates on the gender pay gap have often focused on discrimination by employers, whether explicit or implicit, and the subsequent implications for men and women’s pay in the workplace. We use data from an online crowdworking platform, where workers’ sex is unknown to the employer, to assess whether there is a gender pay gap among crowdworkers. Despite employers not knowing the gender of the workers, the data nonetheless reveal a gender pay gap, with women earning on average 82% of what men earned. Nevertheless, further analysis of the data reveal that the earnings gap between men and women can largely be explained by the individual characteristics of the worker (crowdworking experience and educational level) and women’s domestic responsibilities. Thus even in the absence of employer discrimination, domestic responsibilities that are overwhelmingly shouldered by women affect how they carry out their work and thus what they can earn. This finding points to a need to institute policies that address the sexual division of labour in the household, such as parental leave policies, as well as the public provision of childcare and elder care services to ease the burden of individual care responsibilities. In addition, crowdwork is currently not regulated by labour law which is affecting the overall level of earnings and working conditions of crowdworkers.

Vexatious Claims: Challenging the Case for Employment Tribunal Fees

Since July 2013, recourse to Employment Tribunals in the United Kingdom has attracted fees of up to £1,200 for single claimants. The impact of this reform has been dramatic: within a year, claims dropped by nearly 80 per cent. This paper suggests that this fee regime is in clear violation of domestic and international norms, including Article 6(1) ECHR and the EU principle of effective judicial protection. Drawing on rational choice theory and empirical evidence, we argue that the resulting payoff structures, negative for the majority of successful claimants, strike at the very essence of these rights. The measures are, furthermore, disproportionate in light of the Governments stated policy aims: fees have failed to transfer cost away from taxpayers, have failed to encourage early dispute resolution, and have failed to deter vexatious litigants. The only vexatious claims, we find, appear to be those which motivated the reforms in the first place.Since July 2013, recourse to Employment Tribunals in the United Kingdom has attracted fees of up to £1,200 for single claimants. The impact of this reform has been dramatic: within a year, claims dropped by nearly 80 per cent. This paper suggests that this fee regime is in clear violation of domestic and international norms, including Article 6(1) ECHR and the EU principle of effective judicial protection. Drawing on rational choice theory and empirical evidence, we argue that the resulting payoff structures, negative for the majority of successful claimants, strike at the very essence of these rights. The measures are, furthermore, disproportionate in light of the Governments stated policy aims: fees have failed to transfer cost away from taxpayers, have failed to encourage early dispute resolution, and have failed to deter vexatious litigants. The only vexatious claims, we find, appear to be those which motivated the reforms in the first place.

What do consumers consider before they choose? Identification from asymmetric demand responses

Consideration set models relax the assumption that consumers are aware of all available options. Thus far, identification arguments for these models have relied either on auxiliary data on what options were considered or on instruments excluded from consideration or utility. In a discrete choice framework subsuming logit, probit and random coefficients models, we prove that utility and consideration set probabilities can be separately identified without these data intensive methods. In full-consideration models, choice probabilities satisfy a symmetry property analogous to Slutsky symmetry in continuous choice models. This symmetry breaks down in consideration set models when changes in characteristics perturb consideration, and we show that consideration probabilities are constructively identified from the resulting asymmetries. In a lab experiment, we recover preferences and consideration probabilities using only data on which items were ultimately chosen, and we apply the model to study hotel choices on Expedia.com and insurance choices in Medicare Part D.