Felix Sebastian Døssing his PhD thesis
Felix Sebastian Døssing defends his PhD thesis :"Essays on Generosity, Paternalism and Unemployment".
Candidate
Felix Sebastian Døssing
Title:"Essays on Generosity, Paternalism and Unemployment"
Time and place:
2 December 2020 at 14:00. in CSS 26.2.21. Link to attend the PhD defense follows here: :https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/9536476672
Assessment CommitteeProfesssor
Professor Mette Ejrnæs, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen (chairman)
Professor Julia Nafziger, Aarhus University, Denmark
Professor Jonathan Meer, Texas A&M, US
Abstract
The present thesis is composed of three self-contained chapters, each of which address aspects of economic and political behavior. The first chapter studies the effects of collective unemployment insurance implemented for about 70,000 members of the second largest union in Denmark. With government benefits often leaving many workers with low replacement rates, collective insurance is a novel non-government solution to overcoming the difficulties associated with private insurance. The attractiveness of collective unemployment insurance, however, presupposes that the externality imposed on the government system is minimal and that it can exist without large amounts of adverse selection. I study both of these aspects and find that the implementation of collective UI – in spite of leading to large increases in replacement rates – did not lead to increased unemployment and was not associated with the selection of individuals with higher risk of unemployment. Due to the large sample size, it is possible to put a low upper bound on the possible adverse effects.
The second paper documents and investigates a large amount of homophily in the generosity of couples. Females and males are three times as likely at any age to donate to charity if their partner donates to charity. I use a set of econometric methods to decompose this association into the amount explained by the selection of generous partners by generous individuals and the amount explained by generous individuals influencing their partners. I find that 40-60% of the correlation is explained by social influence.
The third and last chapter uses a laboratory experiment to study how individuals make use of the opportunity to regulate the choices of others. In the normative debate on choice regulation it is often assumed that regulators are both benevolent and competent. By contrast, the results from the experiment show that self-selection into being a choice regulator is unrelated to (information about) one’s relative ability. The experiment also shows that many regulators choose to use their regulatory privilege to hurt rather than help their subjects.