Kristoffer Balle Hvidberg forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling
Kristoffer Balle Hvidberg forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling:"Financial Problems, Fairness Views and Crime: Evidence from New Combinations of Administrative Records and Online Surveys and Experiments"
For at overvære forsvaret pr zoom se venligst dette link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/9536476672
Pass code: 1234
En elektronisk kopi af afhandlingen kan fås ved henvendelse til: charlotte.jespersen@econ.ku.dk
Bedømmelsesudvalg
- Asger Lau Andersen, Økonomisk Institut, Københavns Universitet, Danmark (formand)
- Professor Roine Vestman, Stockholm Universitet
- Professor Randi Hjamarssen, Økonomisk Institut, Göteborg Universitet
Abstract
This PhD dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters. All three chapters leverage new combinations of administrative records and data from online surveys and experiments.
Chapter 1 documents how extensive economic education can reduce the risk of getting into financial problems by comparing people who enter business and economics programs with people who enter other higher education programs. To identify the causal effect, I exploit GPA admission thresholds that quasi-randomize applicants near the thresholds into different programs. I find that admission to an economics education significantly reduces the probability of loan default by one-half. This large reduction in the default probability is associated with changes in financial behavior, but it is not associated with differences in the level or stability of people's income.
Chapter 2 is co-authored with Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Stefanie Stantcheva. In this chapter, we link survey data containing Danish people’s perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with administrative records on their income history, life events, and reference groups. People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to themselves than they really are. The perceived fairness of inequalities is strongly related to current social position, moves with shocks to social position (e.g., unemployment or promotions), and changes when people are experimentally shown their actual positions. People view inequalities within education group and co-workers as most unfair, but underestimate inequality the most exactly within these reference groups.
Chapter 3 is co-authored with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Søren Leth-Petersen and Gregers Nytoft Rasmussen. In this chapter, we revisit a key topic in Social Science, namely who commits crime and why which is important for the design of crime prevention policy. In theory, people who commit crime face different social and economic incentives for criminal activity than other people or they evaluate the costs and benefits of crime differently because they have different preferences. Empirical evidence on the role of preferences is scarce. Theoretically, risk tolerant, impatient and self-interested people are more prone to commit crime than risk averse, patient and altruistic people. We test these predictions with a unique combination of data where we use state-of-the art methods in experimental economics to elicit the preferences of young men and link this experimental data to their criminal records. In addition, our data allow us to control extensively for other characteristics such as cognitive skills, socio-economic background and self-control problems. We find that preferences are strongly associated with actual criminal behavior. Impatience and, in particular, risk tolerance are still strong predictors when we include the full battery of controls. Crime propensities are 8-10 percentage points higher for the most risk tolerant individuals compared to the most risk averse. This effect is half the size of the effect of cognitive skills, which is one of the best predictors of criminal behavior. Looking into different types of crime, we find that preferences predict property offences, while self-control problems predict violent, drug and sexual offences.