| Abstract: |
This paper revisits results from a field experiment conducted in Florence,
Italy to study the effects of incentives offered to high school teens to
motivate them to visit art museums and to identify best practices to transform
this behavior into a long run cultural consumption. Students belonging to a
first group of classes receive a flier with basic information and opening
hours of a main museum in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. Students in a second
group of classes receive the flyer and a short presentation conducted by an
art expert. Students in a third group of classes, in addition to the flyer and
the presentation, receive also a nonfinancial reward in the form of
extra-credit points towards their school grade. Taking a Principal
Stratification approach, we explore the causal pathways that may lead students
to increase their future museum attendance. Within the strata defined by
compliance to the three forms of encouragement, we estimate associative and
dissociative principal causal effects, that is, effects of the encouragement
on the primary outcome, long run cultural consumption, that are associative or
dissociative with respect to the effects of the encouragements on the Palazzo
Vecchio visit. This analysis allows to interpret these effects as ascribable
either to the encouragements, or to the museum visits, or to classroom
spillovers. To face identification issues, estimation is performed with
Bayesian inferential methods using hierarchical models to account for
clustering. The main findings of the analysis are as follows: what seems to
matter the most is the motivational incentive (i.e., the presentation), rather
than the induced experience, i.e., the Palazzo Vecchio visit. |