Patrick Nolen

Incentives and children's dietary choices: A field experiment in primary schools☆

We conduct a field experiment in 31 primary schools in England to test the effectiveness of different temporary incentives on increasing choice and consumption of fruit and vegetables at lunchtime. In each treatment, pupils received a sticker for choosing a fruit or vegetable at lunch. They were eligible for an additional reward at the end of the week depending on the number of stickers accumulated, either individually (individual scheme) or in comparison to others (competition). Overall, we find no significant effect of the individual scheme, but positive effects of competition. For children who had margin to increase their consumption, competition increases choice of fruit and vegetables by 33% and consumption by 48%. These positive effects generally carry over to the week immediately following the treatment, but are not sustained effects six months later. We also find large differences in effectiveness across demographic characteristics such as age and gender.

Unemployment and Vulnerability: A Class of Distribution Sensitive Measures, its Axiomatic Properties, and Applications

Traditional measures of unemployment were only concerned with the total number of people unemployed. In recent years such measures have come under criticism for ignoring those whomay not currently be unemployed but are vulnerable, that is, they live under the risk of becoming unemployed (see Cunningham and Maloney (2000), Glewwe and Hall (1998), Thorbecke (2003)). Alongside this criticism a small but rapidly growing literature is emerging that looks at various aspects of vulnerability and tries to measure it (Amin, Rai, and Topa (2003), Ligon and Schechter (2003), Pritchett, Suryahadi, and Sumarto (2000)).1 There is a presumption in much of this literature and the policy statements of international organizations and governments that since vulnerability is bad, we should craft policy to rescue people from being vulnerable. We argue in this paper that such a prescription is wrong, or, at best, misleading. Under a variety of “normal” situations, having some people vulnerable to unemployment makes the aggregate problem of unemployment less severe (and more bearable). The aim of this paper is to explain this normative stance of ours, to develop a class of unemployment measures that take account of this stance, and then to apply it to US and South African data. The explanation of our normative position is not complicated and the general point can be made simply enough. Suppose there is a society in which, currently,