While vote‐buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote‐buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote‐buying with an experiment‐based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.

Underlying preferences are often considered to be persistent, and are important inputs into economic models. We first conduct an extensive review of the disparate literature studying the stability of preferences measured in experiments. Then, we test the stability of individuals’ choices in panel data from rural Paraguay over almost a decade. Answers to social preference survey questions are quite stable. Experimental measures of risk, time, and social preferences do not exhibit much stability. Correlations between experimental measures of risk aversion are a more precisely estimated zero, whereas correlations for time and social preferences are larger and noisier. We also find no systematic evidence that real world shocks influence play in games. We suggest that in a developing country context researchers should explore designing simpler experiments and including survey questions in addition to experiments to measure preferences.

Play in the traditional trust experiment depends both on trust beliefs and on levels of risk aversion. We ran two experiments with a diverse set of subjects in fifteen villages of rural Paraguay, the traditional trust experiment and a new experiment measuring only risk aversion. We find that risk attitudes are highly predictive of play in the trust game. In addition, omitting risk aversion as a regressor in trust regressions significantly changes the coefficients of important explanatory variables such as gender and wealth.

Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of 'vulnerability' which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of uncertainty. Applying our measure to a panel dataset from Bulgaria in 1994, we find that poverty and risk play roughly equal roles in reducing welfare. Aggregate shocks are more important than idiosyncratic sources of risk, but households headed by an employed, educated male are less vulnerable to aggregate shocks than are other households. * We thank Emmanuel Skoufias for providing the data used in the application of this paper, and UN/WIDER for supporting, in part, research on this theme. 1 Foster et al. (1984) define a family of poverty measures P a , where a is a curvature parameter. Christiaensen and Boisvert (2000); Pritchett et al. (2000); Chaudhuri (2001) and Chaudhuri et al.all estimate EP 0 . Importantly, a policymaker could reduce EP 0 simply by assigning as much risk to poor households as possible. Ravallion (1988) and Kamanou and Morduch (2001) seek to estimate EP 2 ; in this case, poor households are implicitly assumed to have increasing absolute risk aversion.

No abstract