Though many in the general public are concerned about climate change, most are unaware that agriculture and food production accounts for about one quarter of aggregate green house emissions and therefore, diet change is one of the most effective ways that individuals can reduce their climate...

This paper examines the impact of a reduction in the legal drinking age in New Zealand from 20 to 18 on alcohol use, and alcohol-related hospitalisations and vehicular accidents among teenagers. We use both a difference-in-differences approach and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to...

In this paper we look at the relationship between health and income as mediated by "lifestyle" choices; that is, a set of behaviours which are thought to influence health and are generally considered to invoke a substantial degree of free choice. The main underlying assumption is that...

Physically attractive individuals experience a range of advantages in adulthood including higher earnings; yet, how attractiveness influences earlier consequential decisions is not well understood. This paper estimates the effect of attractiveness on engagement in risky behaviours in...

Sexual activities between consenting adults of the same sex are still criminalized in more than one third of the countries in the world despite a global wave of decriminalization in the past sixty years. This paper empirically investigates the effect of sex ratios, i.e. relative number of men to...

The paper studies the link between corruption and social capital (measured as trust), using data from a lab experiment. Subjects play either a harassment bribery game or a strategically identical but differently framed ultimatum game, followed by a trust game. In a second experiment, we elicit...

There is now an extensive literature on "gift exchange" showing that when principals and agents can trade "gifts" (rewards that should not emerge in a competitive equilibrium), exchange becomes more efficient. However, it is not obvious how gift exchange should be organized if the principal's...

We show that the descendants of ancient farmers may have an interest in maintaining the gendered division of labour originally justified on comparative-advantage grounds by the advent of the plough even after they emigrate to a modern industrial economy where individual productivity depends on...

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes (SCs) over the extent to which behavioural...