event
Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar
Tuesday
23
March
Marcela Ibañez Diaz

Religious identity and altruistic giving: A field experiment with children in India

Marcela Ibañez Diaz, Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Göttingen
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Webinar streamed via Zoom

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.

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As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given Marcela Ibañez Diaz, Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Göttingen.

She will present her paper Religious identity and altruistic giving: A field experiment with children in India, coauthored with Pooja Balasubramanian and Daniel Celis.

Abstract: We use a charitable experiment to study altruistic motivations among children living in Mumbai, India. Using structural estimation of the utility function, we disentangle warm-glow and pure altruism motives. In light of historical clashes between Hindu and Muslim religious groups, we further study whether those motivations change when the beneficiary is of the same or different religious identity. We find that warm-glow is the most important motivation. However, this motive is less important for teenagers who display a relatively higher degree of pure altruistic preferences than younger children. Participants show a higher degree of warm-glow and total altruism towards out- group than in-group members. Other factors such as religiosity and father's altruistic giving are positively correlated with the relative degree of warm-glow giving.

 

About the speaker

Marcela Ibañez Diaz leads the Behavioral Development Economics group in the Centre for the Study of Poverty, Equity and Growth. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Economics from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and a PhD from the University of Gothenburg. In 2014 she received the Science Award from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture. She is a member of the program Environment for Development (EfD). Her research interests are behavioral development economics, labor economics and policy evaluation.