Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether thelanguage spoken by a partner in a prisoner’s dilemma game affects behavior and leadsto discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year oldprimary school children in the city of...

We measure time preferences in a sample of 561 children aged seven to eleven years. Using awithin-subject design we compare the behavior of our subjects in two distinct experimentaltasks: a standard choice list with multiple decisions and a simpler time-investment-exerciserequiring one decision...

According to Chen’s (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

In recent years, Europe has experienced a large influx of refugees. While natives' attitudes toward refugees are decisive for the political feasibility of asylum policies, little is known about how these attitudes are shaped by information about refugees' characteristics. We conducted a survey...

We present direct evidence on the link between children’s patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find...

Large, macroeconomic shocks in the past have been shown to influence economic decisions in the present. We study in an experiment with 743 subjects whether small-scale, seemingly negligible, events also affect the formation of risk preferences. In line with a reinforcement learning model, we...

This paper reports results of two controlled experiments on the behavioural effects of relative performance information (RPI) in different organizational structures. Our baseline study 1 focuses on a centralized organizational structure where employees are exogenously assigned to either a...

We conducted a controlled experiment to study how different gender frames used in the instructions affect economic behavior. In our experiment, we systematically varied the framing of the instructions, either using the male, the female, or a gender-inclusive form. Participants played three...