To test the causal impact of religiosity, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program that consisted of 15 weekly half-hour sessions. We analyze outcomes for 6,276 ultra-poor Filipino households six months after the program...

Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they may increase economic growth as A.I. augments our ability to innovate. On the other hand, many experts worry that these advances entail existential risk: creating a superintelligence misaligned with human...

This paper robustly concludes that it cannot. A model is constructed under idealised conditions that presume the risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) are real, that safe AGI products are possible, and that there exist socially-minded funders who are interested in funding...

This article reviews the growing economics literature that studies the politico-economic impacts of heterogeneity in moral boundaries across individuals and cultures. The so-called universalism-versus-particularism cleavage has emerged as a main organizing principle behind various salient...

This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again - social scientists of different...

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....

Economics and ethics both offer important perspectives on our society, but they do so from two different viewpoints - the central focus of economics is how the price system in our economy values resources; the central focus of ethics is the moral evaluation of actions in our society. The rise of...

Throughout the Western world, people's policy views are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. This paper proposes that what partly explains the structure of ideology is moral universalism: the extent to which people's altruism and trust remain constant as social distance...

Ethics in social science experimentation and data collection are often discussed but rarely articulated in writing as part of research outputs. Although papers typically reference human subjects research approvals from relevant institutional review boards, most recognize that such boards are not...

We characterize investors' moral preferences in a parsimonious experimental setting, where we auction stocks with various ethical features. We find strong evidence that investors seek to align their investments with their social values ("value alignment"), and find no evidence of behavior driven...