Incentives and ethnic Minorities: Results of a controlled randomized Experiment in the Netherlands

Abstract

In this article we examine the effect of a prepaid incentive on cooperation rates among ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. We find that the incentive did have a substantial positive effect on the cooperation rates among native sampled units and Western foreigners. Among Non-Western foreigners this effect was only modest. Furthermore, we also matched ethnic minorities with native sampled units using propensity score matching to compare the effect of the incentive on the cooperation rates among ethnic minorities and ‘comparable’ native sampled units. We found that the increase in cooperation rate was larger among natives compared to the increase in cooperation rate among ethnic minorities.