Under review.
In this study I investigate how preferences regarding office and policy goals diverge across parties in Western European parliamentary democracies. Using an original expert survey protocol, I find that parties may pursue office as a means to affect policy, and that the degree to which they prefer policy versus office objectives varies across parties and countries. I also document that a set of observable characteristics, including a party’s size, its policy position, and the frequency with which it has held a government post, explain up to 95% of the cross-sectional variation of policy and office preferences.
Work in Progress.
We modify the multiple price listing design of Holt and Laury~(2002) to study the trade-off between expected payoff and payoff’s skewness. We find that our subjects are equally split between those that are and those that are not averse to negative skewness, despite the fact that they all display risk aversion in the standard Holt and Laury (2002) treatment. We estimate the parameters of a power-expo utility function only on the subset of subjects, whose behavior across treatments is consistent with this functional form and find that relative risk aversion can be twice as large as what is typically found in these experiments.
Coauthor: R. Colacito and P. Fulghieri