Michèle Belot
Michèle Belot joined CESS in October 2008. She holds a Ph.d. in economics from Tilburg University (CentER) and was previously a lecturer at the Economics Department at the University of Essex. Her main research interests are in behavioural and labour economics.
Click to download Curriculum vitae
CESS
Nuffield College
New Road
OX1 1NF
Oxford
Phone:
+44 1865 278 548
Email: Michele.Belot@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
WHAT I AM WORKING ON (AND WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING...)
CHILDREN AND EDUCATION
“Favoritism Practices at School: Evidence from the Field”, with Jeroen van de Ven
Schools are fascinating environments for economists: From very young ages, children are exposed to team work, competition, incentives (positive and negative). We wanted to see to what extent children favor their friends on the playground. We conducted an experiment in 9 schools and Belgium. Children were assigned in teams of 4 and had to perform a task. After a first round where everyone participated, we asked them to pick 1 person who should do the task again for the team. We find that children clearly favor their friends. The older ones (11-12 year olds) do care about performance too but the younger ones (6-7) do not. However, we also find an interesting and surprising flip side to favoritism: Children are more likely to put effort in a task when they have been favored by their friends.
“Healthy School meals on Educational Achievements”, with Jonathan James
Children's diet is a major source of preoccupation in many developed countries. The concerns have mainly been focused on the implications for obesity and health outcomes. However, the effects of children's poor diet may extend beyond health; food is an obvious input in the "learning production function" and deficiencies in diet may result in important deficiencies in nutrients playing an essential role in cognitive development. This study exploits a unique experiment in the UK, the "Feed Me Better Campaign" where the meals served in the 81 schools of one area (Greenwich) were changed drastically by the British Chef Jamie Oliver. Because the campaign was literally designed as a large-scale experiment, it offers a unique opportunity to assess the causal effects of healthier food on educational outcomes. We find that educational outcomes did improve in Englsih and Science, although we cannot rule out small effects. We also find that the campaign reduced absenteeism by 15% .
DATING AND MARRIAGE
We study the determinants of partnership formation using field data from a commercial speed dating agency in the UK. Speed dating data offer unique information on “choice sets” people face and enable us to identify to what extent choices are driven by preferences for specific characteristics (and in particular for similar characteristics) and by opportunities (who you happen to meet in a particular evening). We find that opportunities play a major role in comparison to preferences. That is, at the stage of first meeting, subjects are relatively open-minded.
“The anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender asymmetries in Intermarriage”, with Jan Fidrmuc
Both in the UK and in the US, black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are much less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. This is somewhat puzzling because theories of intermarriage based on socio-economic characteristics would predict the exact opposite pattern (for example because Black men tend to be less educated than Asian men). We show that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for a taller husband, can explain a large proportion of these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries.
MIGRATION
“Cultural barriers in migration between OECD countries”, with Sjef Ederveen
Labor mobility is very low in Europe, both within and across countries, despite large economic differentials. This study investigates the role of cultural barriers on migration between OECD countries. We use data for 22 OECD countries, covering the period 1990-2003. Our results provide strong evidence for a negative effect of cultural differences on migration flows between countries. Cultural and institutional barriers do a much better job in explaining the pattern of migration flows between developed countries than traditional economic variables such as income and unemployment differentials.
“Immigration Selection in the OECD”, with Tim Hatton
In the migration literature, the Roy model predicts that migration should be relatively more skilled from countries with a compressed wage distribution to countries with a less equal wage distribution. However, the actual pattern is the exact opposite. We develop a variant of the Roy model to estimate the determinants of educational selectivity by source and destination country. Our key finding is that the effects of the skill premium on migration are in line with the predictions of the Roy model, once when we take account of poverty constraints operating in source countries.
HIGH STAKES AND BEHAVIOUR IN PUBLIC
“Beauty and the Sources of Discrimination”, with V. Bhaskar and Jeroen van de Ven.
Discrimination based on attractiveness seems quite different than other forms of discrimination: somehow it seems less important (even entertaining to some extent) and it is not an objective characteristic (and therefore hard to regulate upon). We study discriminatory practices based on attractiveness in a highly public field setting - a television game show - where the performance of contestants is clear-cut and public and the stakes are high. We find that attractive players are substantially less likely to be eliminated by their peers, even when this is costly. Interestingly, we do not find discrimination on other dimensions. We investigate third party perceptions of discrimination by asking experimental subjects to predict elimination decisions. Subjects' predictions implicitly assign a role for attractiveness but underestimate its magnitude. Thus, we conclude that discrimination based on attractiveness exists, but there seems to be little social awareness associated with it.
“Can Observers Predict Trustworthiness”, with V. Bhaskar and Jeroen van de Ven.
We analyze experimental evidence on whether untrained subjects can predict how trustworthy an individual is. Two players on a TV show play a high stakes prisoner's dilemma with pre-play communication. Our subjects report probabilistic beliefs that each player cooperates, before and after communication. Subjects correctly predict that women, and players who voluntarily promise that they will cooperate, are more likely to cooperate. They are also able to distinguish truth from lies when a player is asked about his or her intentions by the host. In consequence, and in contrast with the psychology literature, our naive subjects are able to distinguish defectors from cooperators, with the latter inducing beliefs that are 7 percentage points higher. We also study Bayesian updating in the natural and complex context, and find mean reversion in beliefs, and reject the martingale property.
