Well it’s not it the protestant bible, so it’s not canon, but it’s not part of the apocrypha either. I just don’t know.

Why doubt the claim? It is initially counter intuitive but actually makes sense if you think about it.

In any case, it’s not just a story, it is described in this paper:

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

I was making a dumb comment about the use of the word apocryphal. I thought I was clever last night.

I’ve read about the daycare fines before and didn’t have reason to doubt it any more or less than other anecdotes I’ve read. The paper you linked seems like pretty good evidence that it actually happened — assuming the rest of the paper supports the abstract.