Electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development. This is because they may limit the provision of public goods. In this paper, we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate...

Sellers in eBay auctions have the opportunity to choose both a public minimum bid amount and a secret reserve price. We ask, empirically, whether the seller is made better or worse off by setting a secret reserve above a low minimum bid, versus the option of making the reserve public by using it...

Discriminatory hiring practices, while of substantial empirical and theoretical interest, are notoriously difficult to document. This paper compares hiring practices in the United States and in Switzerland, using an experimental setup that allows me to isolate the effect of firm decisions on the...

Numerous researchers have examined entrepreneurshipfrom varied perspectives, analyzing by units such as the individual, theenvironment, the project, and the new organization. However, researchers fromother fields often criticize entrepreneurship research for several reasonsincluding the lack of...

Most field experiments in social science analyze mass behavior. In this paper we explore the possibility of using experimental design to analyze elite behaviors. We provide an experimental strategy based on a modified “c.v. Experiment” to study the behavior of candidates during elections. To...

Political campaigns currently make extensive use of direct mail, particularly in state and local races, yet its effects on voter behavior are not well understood. This essay presents the results of large-scale randomized field experiments conducted in Connecticut and New Jersey during state and...