Can political leaders change constituents' beliefs? If so, is it rhetoric, identity, or the interaction of the two that matters? We construct a large-scale experiment where participants are exposed to anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant speeches from both Presidents Obama and Trump. We benchmark...

We repeatedly elicit beliefs about the returns to study effort, in a large university course. A behavioral model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and malleable beliefs predicts that the dynamics of beliefs mirrors the importance of exerting self-control, such that believed returns increase as the...

In this paper we model the interaction between leaders, their followers and crowd followers in a coordination game with local interaction. The steady states of a dynamic best-response process can feature a coexistence of Pareto dominant and risk dominant actions in the population. The existence...

We examine whether economic and military competence of political leaders affect their duration in office. We introduce leader heterogeneity in the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and derive the hypothesis that in the presence of a revolutionary threat, economic competence...

Research on leadership in economics has developed in parallel to the literature in management and psychology and links between the fields have been sparse. Whereas modern leadership scholars mostly focus on transformational and related leadership styles, economists have mainly emphasized the...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

We study the pattern of correlations across a large number of behavioral regularities, with the goal of creating an empirical basis for more comprehensive theories of decision-making. We elicit 21 behaviors using an incentivized survey on a representative sample (n = 1;000) of the U.S....

We study response behavior in surveys and propose a method to identify and improve the informativeness of survey evidence. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that responses imperfectly reveal respondents' characteristics due to limited...

We validate survey measures of social capital with a new data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 lost wallets across 40 countries, we find that survey measures of social capital - especially questions concerning generalized...