The cognitive consequences of exclusionary national policies
Amma Panin, UCLouvain, Belgium
Abstract from the paper that the speaker will discuss:
Ethno-nationalist governments frequently adopt policies that challenge the status of ethnic minorities as equal members of the nation. We propose that such policies – even when purely symbolic – have tangible consequences for the groups they target. Exposure to exclusionary policies may reduce the cognitive bandwidth of individuals belonging to marginalized groups, leading to worse economic decisions. We test this hypotheses in India, where the party in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), promotes a nationalist ideology that favours Hindus over Muslims. We employ close to 1000 workers in the Indian state of West Bengal to work on basic data entry and information processing tasks. We randomize whether workers encounter content that mentions either symbolic or material exclusionary policies. We measure how exposure to exclusionary policies affects productivity in a separate, unrelated transcription task. We also give workers the opportunity to select one of two payment contracts and we measure how treatment changes the probability of choosing the “wrong” contract in terms of earnings.
Zoom link to join the seminar online:
https://unu-merit-eu.zoom.us/j/84252349361?pwd=VGxRcURBNzVtcTgyZlhvMjFyRFFQQT09
About the speaker:
Amma Panin is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Louvain. She studies how risk and uncertainty shape economic decision making in developing countries. In terms of decision processes and the preferences that drive them, her work focuses on alternatives to expected utility theory and how such preferences can be modeled and measured in the field. She also explores how social preferences and motivated beliefs—particularly in the context of religious practice—shape risk-coping strategies in the absence of formal insurance institutions.
She obtained a PhD in Economics from the Berlin School of Economics in 2018.
Venue: Room 0.18, Boschstraat 24, Maastricht (UNU-MERIT) and Online
Date: 25 April 2024
Time: 12:00 - 13:00 CEST