TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bettinger,Eric
AU  - Slonim,Robert
TI  - Using Experimental Economics to Measure the Effects of a Natural Educational Experiment on Altruism
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11725
PY  - 2005
Y2  - October 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11725
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11725.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Eric Bettinger
Stanford School of Education
CERAS 522, 520 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/736-7727
Fax: 650/723-9931
E-Mail: ebettinger@stanford.edu

Robert Slonim
The University of Sydney
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
H04 - Merewether
NSW 2006 Australia
E-Mail: robert.slonim@sydney.edu.au
AB  - Economic research examining how educational intervention programs affect primary and secondary schooling focuses largely on test scores although the interventions can affect many other outcomes. This paper examines how an educational intervention, a voucher program, affected students' altruism. The voucher program used a lottery to allocate scholarships among low-income applicant families with children in K-8th grade. By exploiting the lottery to identify the voucher effects, and using experimental economic methods, we measure the effects of the intervention on children's altruism. We also measure the voucher program's effects on parents' altruism and several academic outcomes including test scores. We find that the educational intervention positively affects students' altruism towards charitable organizations but not towards their peers. We fail to find statistically significant effects of the vouchers on parents' altruism or test scores.
ER  -