Andrea Robbett

Partisan Discrimination in Hiring Martin Abel, Andrea Robbett and Daniel F. Stone This study experimentally investigates the role of politics in hiring decisions. Participants acted as employers, determining the highest wage to offer candidates based only on their demographic characteristics, education, and partisanship. We find that both Democratic and Republican participants significantly favor co-partisans, with an out-partisan wage penalty of 7.5%. Discrimination is consistent across tasks that focus respectively on competence, shirking, feedback responsiveness, and voluntary effort, and appears largely driven by biased beliefs about partisan productivity, while affective polarization is also predictive of the out-partisan wage penalty. Discrimination does not increase in a treatment where workers benefit financially from being hired.

Does #Politics matter more than race in #Hiring?
Martin Abel, @andrearobbett.bsky.social and @dfstone.bsky.social found that employers penalize workers from opposing parties by 7.5% – nearly as much as the college degree premium.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....

This is such an achievement!! Wow!!

To see the table of contents or be notified when the book is released, please visit: sites.google.com/view/robbett...

The goal is to both synthesize the broad and rapidly evolving literature into a (somewhat!) coherent narrative and to demonstrate how these behavioral regularities can be incorporated into standard economic theory to better describe how people actually behave.

The book is intended as an accessible yet rigorous introduction for undergrads (and others curious about the field), which emphasizes the iterative process of developing and testing theory to produce more accurate models of human behavior.

💥Some news!💥 After four years of pondering, writing, and revising, I’ve sent a complete draft of my behavioral economics textbook off to MIT Press. More info about the book, including the full table of contents, is in the link below.

The Long-Run Effects of California's Paid Family Leave Act on Women's Careers and Childbearing: New Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design and US Tax Data (February 2025) - We use administrative tax data to analyze the cumulative, long-run effects of California's 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (CPFL) on women's employment, earnings, and childbearing. A regression-discontinuity design exploits the sharp increase in the weeks of paid leave available under the law. We find no evidence that CPFL increased employment, boosted earnings, or encouraged childbearing, suggesting that CPFL had little effect on the gender pay gap or child penalty. For first-time mothers, we find that CPFL reduced employment and earnings a decade after they gave birth.

Big congratulations to @middecon.bsky.social's own Tanya Byker, whose paper with Martha Bailey, Elana Patel and Shanthi Ramnath on California's paid family leave policy was published in the current AEJ: Policy @aeajournals.bsky.social.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Thus, overall, our results indicate that social norms are a meaningful contributor to our current polarization of reality. Please feel free to DM for paper draft and thanks for reading.

Figure shows the average financial adjustment and the likelihood of answers being punished or rewarded based on accuracy and partisan congeniality. For each dependent variable, inaccurate congenial responses are better received than accurate uncongenial ones.

What about their punishment/reward behavior? Participants are less likely to punish/more likely to reward accurate and/or partisan answers. But when the two conflict, partisanship wins out: Wrong, congenial responses are rewarded more (punished less) than correct, uncongenial ones.

Figure indicates that the proportion of correct answers decreases for uncongenial questions for both treatments, while there is little effect for congenial questions.

Both treatments significantly increase the partisanship of answers and decrease their accuracy, and this effect is driven by the uncongenial questions. (Interestingly, there is a partisan difference: Democrats respond more to norm information while Republicans are influenced by punishment/rewards.)

Do these distinct partisan norms influence participants' stated beliefs regarding political facts? We use a 2x2 experimental design that varies whether participants see information about their party's norm while answering and whether co-partisans can pay to financially punish/reward their answer.

Figure reports the proportion of respondents who answer a specific question correctly (when financially incentivized) versus those who identify a norm approving the correct answer.

These gaps in normative evaluations are not purely attributable to biased beliefs about the correct answer, because respondents' assessments of their party’s norms were more partisan than the actual answers others (drawn from the same subject pool) gave when answering for a small financial reward.

Image reports the social appropriateness of providing an accurate answer to 10 different true/false questions about politics used in the experiment. For all but one question, Democrats' and Republicans' responses differ significantly, with the mean rating falling on opposite sides of the origin according to the expected party valence

We find clear partisan norms governing responses to factual questions: Both Ds and Rs view accurate -- but politically uncongenial -- responses as being socially inappropriate for members of their party and the norms differ by party for all but one question.

We begin with a motivating experiment, in which we elicit social norms over answers to true/false factual questions related to the election, using the Krupka-Weber method. Partisans report how socially appropriate each answer is for their party & earn a bonus if their rating matches the mode.

Title page of paper: "Reality Bites: Partisan Beliefs as Enforced Norms" by Andrea Robbett and Peter Hans Matthews. Abstract: How do partisan social norms influence stated factual beliefs about politics? We report the results of two online experiments, conducted on the eve of the 2024 US election, in which participants evaluated factual political statements. In a motivating experiment, we first elicit social norms over reported beliefs and find that Democrats and Republicans identify divergent partisan norms over factual statements. In our main experiment, we find that these norms influence stated beliefs: Learning about which statements co-partisans believe are appropriate for the group and/or that co-partisans could punish or reward them both cause respondents' factual statements to be less accurate and more in line with partisan biases.

How do social norms influence partisans' factual statements about politics? Our new working paper (w/ @phminvt.bsky.social ) reports the results of an experiment conducted on election day. 🧵

The MiddExLab Virtual Experimental Economics seminar series resumes next week! The talks are Thursdays at noon Eastern (NYC time) and all are welcome. Please sign up here to receive the Zoom links:

sites.google.com/view/middexl...

#econsky @ihaal.bsky.social @katymilkman.bsky.social