Talk - Can National Identity Trump Ethnic Favoritism? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Singapore
2:30 - 4:00pm
Room 3598 (Lifts 27-28), 3/F Academic Building

Prior work in ethnic politics and political economy has shown that in-group ethnic favoritism can lead to adverse political and social outcomes. However, in many of these studies, ethnicity could not be easily disentangled from other dimensions of identity, such as religion or nationality. As a result, the independent effects of ethnic differences on social cohesion remain unclear. In this paper, we leverage Singapore's unique demographic composition and housing policies to examine how ethnicity and national identity shape altruism toward members of ethnic outgroups. We conducted a field experiment in which we sent 3,150 misdirected letters to public housing residents. Each letter contained vouchers and cues indicating the intended recipient’s identity, and we tracked their return as a measure of altruism. Our findings offer mixed evidence of ethnic favoritism: on average, individuals identifying as ethnically Chinese or Indian display higher levels of altruism toward their ethnic outgroups, whereas individuals identifying as Malay tend to favor their coethnics. Additionally, we find that nationality (though not shared nationality) and social class (though not shared social class) are strong predictors of altruistic behavior. In particular, individuals with higher income and Singaporean nationality are more likely to return misdirected letters (i) when they perceive that the intended recipients belong to a lower socioeconomic class; (ii) when the voucher value is larger; and (iii) as their own education and household income increase. We discuss the implications of these findings for ethnic politics, social cohesion, and nation-building.

When
Where
Room 3598 (Lifts 27-28), 3/F Academic Building
Language
English
More Information

Guillem Riambau is an associate professor of economics at the University of Barcelona. He obtained his PhD in Boston University (2012). His main area of research is political economy, although recently he has also shifted his focus to behavioral and experimental economics. He is particularly interested in the topics of elections, discrimination, gender, and honesty. Prior to the University of Barcelona, he was based at Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore.

 

Host: Prof Yu Hsiang Lei, Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science, HKUST

Speakers / Performers:
Prof Guillem Riambau
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Barcelona
Organizer
Division of Social Science
RSS