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Most professional economists believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this increased selfishness is due to economics education. This article offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behavior in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people act more selfishly. Rather, this natural experiment suggests that the particular behavior of economists can be explained by a selection effect. (JEL A13, A20, H41)
I. INTRODUCTION
Economic science is constantly being accused of having a blind spot. It is said that, compared to efficiency, equity is not given its just weight in the education of economists. Moreover, it is argued that the Homo economicus is too narrowly defined and that it does not explain the behavior of human beings accurately. According to the critics, the consequences of this oversimplified view of human behavior is that the students of economics act in a more selfish way than students of other social sciences.1 Economists create the type of selfish persons (the Homo economicus) they axiomatically assume in their theories. If this claim indeed holds in reality, the critics are right in emphasizing that economic science makes the much-needed cooperation in the world more difficult. Hirschman (1982, 1466) puts it the following way: "The emphasis on self-interest typical of capitalism makes it more difficult to secure the collective goods and cooperation increasingly needed for the proper functioning of the system in its later stages."
There is evidence that students of economics behave more selfishly than other people (e.g., Frank et al., 1993; 1996; Marwell and Ames, 1981; Frank and Schulze, 2000). The results are mainly based on laboratory experiments with students. These studies cannot exclude that economists see the experimental setting as "an IQ test of sorts" (Frank, 1988, 226). Students may play the equilibrium learned in their economics classes, but they do not apply it to real life situations. In contrast, we use a unique and extremely large data set (more than 96,500 observations) to study the behavior of economics students in a natural setting. At the University of Zurich, every student has to decide each semester whether he or she wants...