Join us for an engaging talk by Maria Porter. This event will take place April 2 in Social Sciences 224 from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and participate in a stimulating discussion!

Bios

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona. I also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics.

My research areas are in applied microeconomics, agricultural economics, risk and insurance, impact evaluation, social preferences, and intra-household resource allocation. I explore social and psychological factors influencing people’s decisions – as family members, farmers, workers, or entrepreneurs – and how these decisions impact others.

I have taught courses in intermediate microeconomics, household and development economics, behavioral and experimental economics, and econometrics. I completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Chicago.

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Abstract

This paper explores adult children’s motivations for providing support to their parents across two different cultures: England and China. We explore differences in sharing with one’s parents when playing modified dictator games in the lab, where we vary the following factors for each participant: the relative cost of giving to parents, the available endowment for sharing with parents; as well as the amount of information parents receive about one’s decisions in the lab.

We find that many male respondents in England are quite responsive to the information treatment, whereas respondents in China do not alter decisions by information treatment. That is, many respondents in China maximize total payments between themselves and their parents, regardless of whether parents are informed of their decisions in the lab experiment.

Both men and women in England exhibit higher degrees of selfishness towards parents in the no information treatment compared to the full information treatment, as well as in the no information treatment when compared to their counterparts in China.

In addition, we find some differences across gender and ethnicity in China. Men exhibit greater selfishness towards parents than women in China (no matter the information treatment). Gender-biased men exhibit greater selfishness towards parents than both gender-biased women and gender-neutral men. Among gender-neutral ethnic groups, men and women give similarly to parents.

Our paper contributes to the literature exploring family dynamics and decisions in the lab, by recruiting participants from a unique and understudied population of ethnic minorities in China and comparing them to participants in a similar study previously done in England. To our knowledge, this is the first study to make such an international comparison of decisions in lab experiments involving family members