Alpaslan Akay

The Effect of Religiosity and Religious Festivals on Positional Concerns: An Experimental Investigation of Ramadan

This article examines the effect of religion on positional concerns using survey experiments. We focus on two of the dimensions of religion – degree of religiosity and religious festivals. By conducting the experiments during both the most important day of Ramadan (the Night of Power) and a day outside Ramadan, we find that Ramadan overall has a small and negative impact on positional concerns. Detailed analyses based on the sorting of individuals’ degree of religiosity reveal that the decrease in the degree of positional concerns during Ramadan is mainly explained by a decrease in positionality among individuals with a low degree of religiosity.

Asymptotic bias reduction for a conditional marginal effects estimator in sample selection models

In this article we discuss the differences between the average marginal effect and the marginal effect of the average individual in sample selection models, estimated by the Heckman procedure. We show that the bias that emerges as a consequence of interchanging the measures, could be very significant, even in the limit. We suggest a computationally cheap approximation method, which corrects the bias to a large extent. We illustrate the implications of our method with an empirical application of earnings assimilation and a small Monte Carlo simulation.