On Monday, May 28 2018, 14:00 - 15:30, Petra Thiemann (University of Lund) will present:
Closing the Teacher Quality Gap? An Empirical Analysis of Teacher-to-Classroom Assignment Problems
Disadvantaged students are frequently matched with low-quality teachers, even within schools. It is however unclear whether alternative teacher assignment schemes would lead to better average education outcomes or to more equal education outcomes. To investigate potential gains from alternative teacher assignment schemes we consider an education production function in which the returns to teacher quality can differ across students with different ability levels. Our data comes from a field experiment where teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within schools. We derive and test the assumptions under which the complementarity between teacher quality and student ability can be identified, also taking peer effects into account; based on the model we find empirical evidence for complementarity between teacher quality and student ability in the field experiment.
Room: WST-C.02.12, Weststadttürme Berliner Platz 6-8, Essen
On Monday May 14, 2018, 14:00 - 15:30 Christian Waibel (ETH Zürich) will present:
Voluntary Pooling of Genetic Risk: A Health Insurance Experiment
Scientific and technological advances increasingly allow for better tailoring of health insurance plans to individual health risk profiles. This development questions the sustainability of health plans that feature strong cross-subsidization across different health risk types. An important observation is that the willingness to cross-subsidize in health plans might depend on whether the risk is uncontrollable by individuals, such as genetic risk, or modifiable via health behaviors. In this paper, we provide the results of an experiment on the willingness to pool genetic risk in health insurance. Subjects’ overall health risk has an assigned, uncontrollable genetic risk part and a behavioral risk part, which can be reduced by costly effort. The experimental variation either includes behavioral risk in the pooling of a group insurance scheme or separates it out. Although we observe social preferences for pooling, we observe only a low level of actual genetic risk pooling across the two experimental conditions. This is due to both large heterogeneity in social preferences for pooling across subjects, and the dynamics of the willingness to pay for group insurance in the different experimental markets. Thus, our results indicate that mandatory pooling might be needed if, under the veil of ignorance, a society nevertheless wishes to pool certain forms of heterogeneous risk exposure, such as genetic risk.
Room: WST-C.02.12, Weststadttürme Berliner Platz 6-8, Essen
On Monday May 7, 2018, 14:00 - 15:30 Helmuth Cremer (TSE, University of Toulouse) will present:
Long-term care policy with nonlinear strategic bequests
We study the design of long-term care (LTC) policies when children differ in their cost of providing informal care. Parents do not observe this cost, but they can commit to a "bequests rule" specifying a transfer conditional on the level of informal care. Care provided by high-costchildren is distorted downwards in order to minimize the rent of low-cost ones. Social LTC insurance is designed to maximize a weighted sum of parents' and children's utility. The optimal uniform public LTC provision strikes a balance between insurance and children's utility. Under decreasing absolute risk aversion less than full insurance is provided to mitigate the distortion on informal care which reduces children's rents. A nonuniform policy conditioning LTC benefits on bequests provides full insurance even against the risk of having children with a high cost of providing care. Quite surprisingly the level of informal care induced by the optimal (uniform or nonuniform) policy always increases in the children's welfare weight.
Room: WST-C.02.12, Weststadttürme Berliner Platz 6-8, Essen.
