As financial literacy has been shown to correlate with good financial decisions, policymakers promote educational programs to improve individuals’ financial decisions. But who selects into educational programs and who acquires information about personal finance? This paper, in a field study...

This Letter reviews the empirical evidence on the extent to which individuals' sense of well-being or happiness is related to metrics of the well-being of others.

Presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Conference: “Implications of Behavioral Economics for Economic Policy”, Boston, Massachusetts, September 28, 2007

Due to incomplete contracts, efficiency of an organization depends on willingness of individuals to take non-selfish actions, such as cooperating when there is no incentive to do so or punishing inefficient actions by others. Organizations also constitute a social boundary, or group. We...

Laboratory experiments are an important methodology in economics, especially in the field of behavioral economics. However, it is still debated to what extent results from laboratory experiments can be applied to field settings. One highly important question with respect to the external validity...

In recent years, a large number of economic theories have evolved to explain people’s pro-social behavior and the variation in their respective behavior. This paper surveys economic theories on pro-social behavior and presents evidence — mainly from the field — testing these theories. In...

This paper investigates the possibility that people discover effective heuristics when playing similar perfect information games of varying complexity. We call this discovery experience Eureka Learning. We use a change-point analysis to identify 35 percent of our subjects as Eureka Learners.