Volunteering plays a prominent role in the charitable provision of goods and services, yet we know relatively little about why people engage in such prosocial acts. The list of possible motivations is long, but recent research has focused on altruism, reputational concerns, and material...

Testosterone, which induces sexual differentiation of the male fetus, is believed to transfer from males to their littermates in placental mammals. Among humans, individuals with a male twin have been found to exhibit greater masculinization of sexually dimorphic attributes relative to those...

Local news offers a unique look not only at customer preferences but also at the strategic response of firms to these preferences. This paper uses a combination of ratings data and newly gathered information on television stations in 25 U.S. markets to examine the decisions of competing firms...

Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous causes that affect timing. We develop a...

Proposition 209, enacted in California in 1996 and made effective the following year, ended state affirmative action programs not only in education, but also for public employment and government contracting. This paper uses CPS data and triple difference techniques to take advantage of the...

Recent research postulating that the diffusion of confidential access to the birth control pill to young women in the United States contributed to the dramatic social changes of the late 1960s and 1970s has not adequately accounted for the largely contemporaneous diffusion of access to abortion....

Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a...

We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to...

Auctions are a popular way to raise money for charities, but relatively little is known, either theoretically or empirically, about the properties of charity auctions. The small theoretical literature suggests that the all-pay auction should garner more money than winner-pay auctions. We conduct...

To investigate the external validity of Ultimatum and Dictator game behavior we conduct experiments in field settings with naturally occurring variation in "social framing. "Our participants are students at Middlebury College, non-traditional students at Kansas City Kansas Community College...