R. Andrew Luccasen

Teaching Macroeconomic Principles Using Animated Cartoons

Multimedia materials are underused and powerful tools for teaching economics. We present examples from cartoons that can be used to illustrate important principles in an introductory macroeconomics class. Clips from Beavis and Butthead, Duck Tales, Futurama, and The Simpsons are used to explain the velocity of money, inflation and long-run monetary policy, interest, future and present value, household production and mismeasurement of GDP, and structural unemployment.

Giving to poverty relief charities: the impact of beliefs and misperceptions toward income redistribution in a real donation experiment

Many Americans hold erroneous beliefs regarding the level of inequality in the United States and the efforts by the federal government to alleviate poverty. In general, they overestimate the extent of poverty relief undertaken by government. Given that poverty relief programs are a public good and likely underprovided, overestimation of the level of income redistribution is likely to exacerbate this under-provision by reducing giving to private charities. This paper considers if this misperception affects giving to poverty-relief charities. We report a real-donation experiment investigating links between contributions to poverty-relief charities and perceptions of federal transfers to low income households. We also ask participants to self-identify political affiliation, religiosity, race, and gender. We find that donations to our poverty relief charities are inversely related to the perceived transfers made to the poorest quintile. Donations are approximately

Behavioural Types in Public Goods Games: A Re-Analysis by Hierarchical Clustering

0.20 less for each

Are tax-financed contributions to a public good completely crowded-out? Experimental evidence

1000 of perceived transfers. Interestingly, we find little correlation between giving and political beliefs.

Monetary incentives versus class credit: Evidence from a large classroom trust experiment

We re-analyse participant behaviour in standard economics experiments studying voluntary contributions to a public good. Previous approaches were based in part on a priori models of decision-making, such as maximising personal earnings, or reciprocating the behaviour of others. Many participants however do not conform to one of these models exactly, requiring ad hoc adjustments to the theoretical baselines to identify them as belonging to a given behavioural type. We construct a typology of behaviour based on a similarity measure between strategies using hierarchical clustering analysis. We identify four clearly distinct behavioural types which together account for over 90% of participants in six experimental studies. The resulting type classification distinguishes behaviour across groups more consistently than previous approaches.