Forthcoming, Journal of Public Economics USING EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS TO MEASURE THE EFFECTS OF A NATURAL EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT ON ALTRUISM*

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-8 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. * We are grateful for research support from James Carlson, Luke Coffman, Samir Dalia, Matthew Dellibovi, Muhammid El-Zoghbi, Matt Ennis, Liz Falvo, Alissa Kumley, Stephen Leider, Rohit Reddy, Erin Riley and Christine Uhlmansiek. We also thank Ellen Garbarino and Jim Rebitzer for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper and seminar participants at Case Western Reserve University, the Education Program at the NBER's Summer Institute 2002, the Midwestern Economic Association Meetings 2001, the International Economic Science Association Meetings 2002, the Middlebury Conference on Field Experiments 2003, and the Research Environment Development Series at Case Western Reserve University 2003. We greatly appreciate the financial support of The Armington Fund, The National Science Foundation Grant No. 0214308, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Upjohn Institute, and The Weatherhead School of Management. We also greatly appreciate Central Catholic High School in Toledo for use of their facilities. Bettinger completed much of this research while a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.