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Abstract: Every year, millions of people relocate to a foreign country for school or work. This research provides evidence of how such international experience shifts preferences and stereotypes related to other nationalities. I use participation in the Erasmus study abroad program as a source of variation in international experience. Students who are ready to participate in the Erasmus program are chosen as a control group for students who have returned from studies abroad. Individuals make decisions in a Trust Game and in a Triple Dictator Game to decompose changes to statistical discrimination from changes to taste-based discrimination. Results show that while students do not differentiate between partners from Northern and Southern Europe in the Trust Game prior to an Erasmus study abroad, students who have returned from Erasmus studies abroad begin to exhibit less trust towards partners from the South. Behavior towards other nationalities in the Triple Dictator Game is not affected by the Erasmus study experience. Overall, the results suggest that participants learn about cross-country variation in cooperative behavior while abroad and therefore statistical discrimination increases with international experience.

Presentations: 2014 ESA European Meetin, Prague (Sep 2014); 29th annual congress of the European Economic Association, Toulouse (Aug 2014); Shifting Attitudes conference at IAST, Toulouse (Jun 2014); London Experimental Workshop, London (May 2014); Thurgau Experimental Economics Meeting (theem) on "Cooperation and competition within and between groups, Stein am Rhein (May 2014); Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen (Apr 2014); 8th Nordic Conference on Behavioral and Experimental Economics (Sep 2014)

Abstract: Many important decisions are made under stress and they often involve risky alternatives. There has been ample evidence that stress influences decision making in cognitive as well as in affective domains, but still very little is known about whether individual attitudes to risk change with exposure to acute stress. To directly evaluate the causal effect of stress on risk attitudes, we adopt an experimental approach in which we randomly expose participants to a psychosocial stressor in the form of a standard laboratory stress-induction procedure: the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups. Risk preferences are elicited using an incentive compatible task, which has been previously shown to predict risk-oriented behavior out of the laboratory. Using three different measures (salivary cortisol levels, heart rate and multidimensional mood questionnaire scores), we show that stress was successfully induced on the treatment group. Our main result is that acute psychosocial stress significantly increases risk aversion. The effect is mainly driven by males; men in our control group are less risk-averse than women, which is a standard result in the literature, but this difference almost disappears when under psychosocial stress.

Abstract: Conflicts between ethnic groups inhibit the functioning of society and can lead to widespread social unrest and violence. Ethnic hostilities typically escalate rapidly and this makes it essential to understand how they spread through the society. Here we present experimental evidence on a large sample of adolescents from Eastern Slovakia, a region characterized by tensions between the majority population and Roma, a segregated minority. We examine the effects of social environment on hostility, measured as the willingness to pay to harm Majority or Roma partners. Our data reveal that subjects do not discriminate against the ethnic minority when making choices in isolation or when exposed to observing the peaceful behavior of peers. However, individual proclivity to follow the aggressive behavior of peers is greatly amplified when the subject of hostility is a member of the ethnic minority, as compared to a co-ethnic partner and, as a consequence, discrimination arises. The results can help explain why ethnic hostilities of masses can spread very quickly, even in societies with few visible signs of systematic inter-ethnic hatred. In terms of policy, the results highlight the important role of early diagnosis and can help explain why many societies found it desirable to institute hate crime laws.

Abstract: It has long been observed that men are more competitive than women on average, and this phenomenon may help to explain gender differences in economic outcomes. Since many competitive situations that affect labor-market outcomes, including university admissions or job interviews, involve heightened levels of stress, we examine how psycho-social stress affects performance and willingness to compete across gender. We use a series of economic experiments in which subjects compete in a simple task. Stress is introduced exogenously through a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test, and measured by salivary cortisol levels throughout the experiment. We find that stress reduces willingness to compete overall. For women, the decrease can be explained by worse performance in competitive environments under stress; men's performance is not affected, and the change in competitiveness seems to be preference-based. These findings suggest that women may be disadvantaged when required to compete in a stressful setting.