Prof. Jean-Robert Tyran, PD

Behavioral Public Economics

While visiting CES (Jan. 9–27), Jean-Robert Tyran plans to work on two new research projects:
Social mobility (with Ada Kovaliukaite): Social mobility evokes the meritocratic (“American”) dream of earning a better life through hard work, while lack of social mobility means that those at the bottom of the social ladder are doomed to remain there, no matter how hard they try. This project 1) experimentally investigates the relevance of the following structural determinants of social mobility: the degree to which success is driven by luck rather than effort, discrimination, wage compression, and the degree of social stratification. The researchers then 2) explore how different policy interventions such as income or inheritance taxes affect social mobility under varying structural conditions. They 3) also investigate peoples’ acceptance of alternative policy measures by the means of voting. An economic model is developed with competition for status and accumulation effects which result from status-dependent access to production technologies. This model serves to generate benchmark predictions that we put to a test in the economic laboratory. “An Experimental Approach to Voting” is the title of Mr. Tyran’s CES Lectures.
Misperceptions about the welfare state (with Christian Koch): This project examines people’s knowledge, reasoning, and attitudes about the welfare state, utilizing a large-scale survey that reaches a representative sample of the Austrian population. With a focus on how people attribute personal responsibility, the researchers are interested in people’s knowledge and potential misperceptions about different welfare-state instruments and their underlying economic principles. To explore how much people’s reasoning is shaped by self-serving biases, they experimentally vary 1) whether welfare-relevant issues – such as immigration and personal health behavior – are salient and 2) whether respondents are provided information that corrects any potential misperceptions. Finally, by linking the survey responses to register data, they probe how people’s reasoning and its malleability are shaped by socio-economic factors. As an additional methodological contribution, they investigate how consistent self-reported data are with register data as well as the impact of any inconsistencies on the analysis. Overall, understanding (mis-)perceptions about the welfare state and their malleability is a key prerequisite for designing reforms that prepare the welfare state against challenges such as immigration and foster its legitimacy.
Jean-Robert Tyran is Professor of Public Economics at the University of Vienna (currently on leave) and Director of the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics. He has served on various editorial boards (Experimental Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, Journal of the Economic Science Association, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Judgment and Decision Making), and professional Boards (Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics, German Economic Association). He is a CESifo Working Paper Author, a research fellow at various institutions (CEPR, London; EPRU, U Copenhagen) and has held numerous visiting positions (Harvard Kennedy School, London School of Economics, Caltech, among others). He is also part-time Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Mr. Tyran previously taught at the University of Copenhagen and the University of St. Gallen. He earned his PhD in Economics at the University of Zurich.