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Let me begin soon after the beginning of economics: with money. Money is a concept whose centrality to Economics, especially to conventional Economics, is hard to overestimate: Money is the main means by which economists tend to appeal more easily to an alleged scientificity for their discipline, because it so easily lets them ‘Go forth and quantify’.

We conduct an experiment asking participants to choose to purchase either a traditional or hybrid car to examine how federal-state conformity of tax incentives impacts the decisions of taxpayers. We also examine perceptions of taxpayers surrounding federal-state conformity. Consistent with theory related to the effects of information environment and using an experiment in which taxpayers are asked to evaluate tax incentives related to a purchase decision between a traditional and hybrid car, we find that conformity is a significant factor in increasing the propensity to take advantage of the tax incentive. Specifically, we find that participants with simple and conforming federal-state incentives are more likely to take advantage of the tax incentive than with complex and conforming federal-state incentives. In addition, the effects of conformity between federal and state incentives suggest that participant perceptions of the federal system were heavily influenced by the actions of the state.

This chapter examines the changes proposed to the current media ethics and regulation regime in Australia following a government inquiry by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein. The inquiry was prompted by The News of the World phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom, which resulted in that publication being closed down by its publisher, News International, and principal shareholder Rupert Murdoch. While finding no evidence of similar misbehaviour by journalists and proprietors in Australia, Finkelstein recommended the establishment of a statutory News Media Council, and the inclusion of online media outlets in this new regulatory regime. This chapter argues that such a regime is unlikely to come into effect, given that it will be opposed by media proprietors and working journalists alike, as well the Federal Opposition, and the taxpayer funded ABC, and that a government with low levels of political capital is unlikely to risk much of that capital in a fight with the media industries in an election year.

The year 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Education, one of John Dewey’s most widely translated and published books around the world still in the author’s lifetime. Nowadays, in a context in which pedagogy is bogged down in ‘economicism’ and suspicion towards any proposal that hints of value, Dewey’s ideas once again provide a ray of hope for a possible future. One of the contemporary authors that has fostered this hopeful reading of Dewey is Martha C. Nussbaum, whose appeal to bringing the humanities back to schools motivated a project on approaching the classic texts with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which we have developed during the past years with secondary education students from three schools in Santiago de Chile, Madrid and London. The project is based on an open reading of Sophocles’s Antigone through an online application that enables students from the participating schools to interact. This chapter delves deeper into the theoretical bases of the project. In the first two sections, we analyse the interpretation that Nussbaum and Dewey each made of Antigone. Then, in the third, we present the Antigone project as a learning experience promoting a creative democracy, as Dewey called it.

This paper uses two studies to examine taxpayers' knowledge of tax incentives for charitable giving and also explores the consequences of this knowledge on charitable giving decisions. The first study surveys 600 US taxpayers to establish a baseline understanding of how making a charitable contribution affects taxpayers. In the second study, we conduct an experiment with 201 US taxpayers in which we manipulate the knowledge of taxpayers by providing an educational intervention; we also measure, if, how much is donated in a hypothetical scenario under various tax deductibility conditions. The first study indicates fewer than half of participants understand the basic principles of how charitable donations affect tax liability. Our second study reveals that a short educational video is extremely effective at improving taxpayers' understanding and helping them accurately estimate the tax benefit associated with charitable giving. However, through moderated mediation analysis, we also show that participants who received this educational intervention and accurately estimated the tax benefits in turn decreased their charitable giving. We conclude that the majority of US taxpayers do not understand whether they benefit from certain deductions and may be overestimating the benefit they receive from charitable giving, resulting in giving more than they intend.

This research investigates the effect of imposing a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) on the likelihood of purchasing SSBs. We design and test an experimental framework that examines this and the effects of providing an explanation about the presence of an SSB tax and information about the negative health effects of consuming SSBs. Consistent with Elbel, Taksler, Mijanovich, Abrams, and Dixon (2013) and Taylor, Kaplan, Villas-Boas, and Jung (2019), we find that imposing a tax, in addition to increasing the conspicuousness of the tax by explaining the presence of a tax (and in some cases, the negative health effects) reduces the likelihood of purchasing an SSB anywhere from 8.39% to 18.15%. We contribute to the public health and tax policy literature by testing consumer choice in a controlled experimental setting and considering the effect of individual differences on the choice to purchase SSBs. Imposing a tax on SSBs may be an effective tool for decreasing SSB consumption that is made more effective when the tax is conspicuous.