Self-signaling theory argues that individuals partly behave prosocially to create or uphold a favorable self-image. To study self-signaling theory, we investigate whether increasing self-image concerns affects charitable giving. In our experiment subjects divide 20 euros between themselves and a...

Does the wish to convince others lead people to persuade themselves about the moral and factual superiority of their position? We investigate this question in the context of two international debating competitions, where persuasion goals (pro or contra a motion) are randomly assigned to debaters...

Policy makers put great emphasis on the role of information about carbon emissions in achieving sustainable decisions by consumers. We conduct two studies to understand the optimal targeting of such information and its effects. First, we conduct an incentivized and representative survey among US...

We present a self- and social-signaling model formalizing findings in political psychology that moral and political judgments stem primarily from intuition and emotion, while reasoning serves to rationalize these intuitions to maintain an image of impartiality. In social interactions, agents’...

Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries- Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

We conduct a large-scale survey experiment in nine European countries to study how priming a major crisis (COVID-19), common economic interests, and a shared identity influences altruism, reciprocity and trust of EU citizens. We find that priming the COVID-19 pandemic increases altruism and...

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? And what are the implications of these changes for the information vot-ers are exposed to and for political accountability? We study these questions using the staggered...

We propose a new method for measuring gender and ethnic stereotypes in news reports. By combining computer vision and natural language processing tools, the method allows us to analyze both images and text as well as the interaction between the two. We apply this approach to over 2 million web...

How does the internet affect young people's mental health? We study this question using administrative data on the universe of cases of mental disorders diagnosed in Italian hospitals between 2001 and 2013, which we combine with broadband internet availability at the municipal level. Broadband...