Essays in Behavioral Public Economics

This dissertation focuses on the behavioral economics of individual decision making and consists of three separate essays. In Chapter 1, I use a laboratory experiment to compare three popular point-of-sale solicitation methods: a fixed donation request (yes or no to a randomly assigned amount); a rounding request (yes or no to an endogenous amount); and an open-ended solicitation. Further, I examine the effects of providing (limited) information on the charity. In Chapter 2, I study key aspects of fundraising campaigns that utilize goals or provision points that must be met in order to provide a good or service. I use a laboratory experiment to comparecampaigns characterized by a final goal only, an intermediate goal and a known final goal, and a third setting where the final goal is known only if the intermediate goal is reached. Across these three settings, I vary whether an individual’s payoff from reaching a goal is uncertain or certain, which is intended to capture the effects of providing vague or precise information on the good or service to be provided. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of officer-involved fatalities, including officer-involved shootings, on domestic violence reporting. I conduct this analysis using county and zip code level data to understand how concentrated any effects of policeviolence may be. Using within-county variation, I test whether the number of domestic violence reports decreases in the week after a fatal officer-involved encounter.