Masaryk University Economic Seminars

We provide the first evidence on legal gender marker adjustments to fiscal incentives. In Austria, a current female marker lowers the retirement age by up to five years, increasing the expected lifetime pension income by 24 percent. Among individuals assigned male at birth, a female marker sharply raises earlier pension claiming. Yet marker changes around retirement age are negligible: we can reject cumulative increases above 0.008 percentage points. The introduction of legal gender self-identification does not affect responsiveness. These findings suggest that the costs of having an incongruent marker, or the social costs of changing it, are very high.

Jan Gromadzki is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is also a Research Affiliate at INEQ and IZA@LISER. His interests lie in labor economics, public economics, and political economy.

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Why do people sometimes give time and at other times give money? We study how this choice is linked to context-specific norms. In an experiment comparing climate and history domains, we document that volunteering is seen as more appropriate in the climate context, while no clear norm favors either form of giving in the history context. This difference is mirrored in behavior: social norms are associated with volunteering when there is a social norm for volunteering, whereas personal norms are more closely associated with behavior when shared expectations are weak. Comparing stakeholders and spectators, we find no evidence that norm perceptions reflect motivated reasoning. Together, the results indicate that social norms are associated with behavior when a shared norm is present, whereas personal norms are more relevant when it is not.

Hande Erkut is a postdoctoral researcher in the Market Behavior research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She is interested in ethics and how it influences and is influenced by decision making across different areas of life, such as social, economic, and health. Her research uses tools from behavioral and experimental economics.

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