We invite you to a FAIR Seminar with Ragan Petrie. Ragan is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University. She's an applied microeconomist who uses behavioral and experimental approaches to study topics in public and labor economics, including motives for charitable giving, gender differences in bargaining and competition, discrimination, social media and the economic preferences of children.
Title: My neighbor next floor: the built environment and social preferences
Abstract:
We assess the effect of the built environment on low-cost helping behavior toward neighbors. The setting is communities in Shanghai, China that, due to rapid development, were involuntarily relocated to different building structures. Our natural field experiment accounts for potential misreporting, attrition, and interference. Treatment assignment avoids interference by design, and we develop a randomization test to account for the bias this introduces. Living one floor apart reduces the willingness to help a neighbor by 20 percentage points, as does adding one more apartment per floor. Small spatial barriers can profoundly shape social interactions, and helping behavior, in urban settings.