There is a longstanding concern that material incentives might undermine prosocial motivation, leading to a decrease in blood donations rather than an increase. This paper provides an empirical test of how material incentives affect blood donations in a large-scale field experiment spanning...

Respected economists invoke the Pareto criterion to argue that inequality doesn't really matter so long as no one ends up with less in absolute terms. Using income levels to measure the well-being of individual families, these economists argue that since the rich now have much more money than...

Who was the greater economist — Adam Smith or Charles Darwin? The question seems absurd. Darwin, after all, was a naturalist, not an economist. But Robert Frank, «The New York Times’» economics columnist and best-selling author of «The Economic Naturalist», predicts that within the next...

Economists can to some extent enlighten policymakers and the public and influence public policy. That enlightenment is achieved more by concrete policy work and application of basics than by fancy models and fancy statistical significance. There is a trade-off between relevance/importance and...

I WANT TO BEGIN BY OFFERING MY SINCERE THANKS TO Andrew Kashdan and Daniel Klein for their spirited critique of my work. They have read me carefully and raised many important questions. But before responding to them in detail, I want to say something about what they perceive as my shortage of...

This chapter was prepared for Elsevier's Handbook of Social Economics (edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matthew Jackson). It brings together some of the recent empirical and experimental evidence regarding preferences for social status. While briefly reviewing evidence from different...

Prevailing economic models of consumer behavior completely ignore the well-documented link between context and evaluation. We propose and test a theory that explicitly incorporates this link. Changes in one group's spending shift the frame of reference that defines consumption standards for...

We show that large-scale debt-financed public infrastructure spending, in addition to (a) generating growth and employment on a similarly large scale and (b) significantly reducing inefficiency-generated public and private costs economy-wide, will also (c) be substantially “self-financing”...

Current estimates of regulatory benefits are too low, and likely far too low, because they ignore a central point about valuation - namely, that people care not only about their absolute economic position, but also about their relative economic position. We show that where the government...