Which is the most binding constraint to microenterprise development, human capital or financial capital? To answer this question, we present the first field experiment that jointly investigates these two constraints for poor microentrepreneurs, by introducing separate treatments of business...

It has been shown that participants in the dictator game are less willing to give money to the other participant when their choice set also includes the option to take money. We examine whether this effect is due to the choice set providing a signal about entitlements in a setting where...

We study the relative importance of intrinsic moral motivation and extrinsic social motivation in explaining behavior in the dictator game. We introduce a novel design that manipulates these two dimensions. The paper offers four main findings. First, intrinsic moral motivation is of fundamental...

The debate between Engelmann and Strobel (2004, 2006) and Fehr, Naef, and Schmidt (2006) highlights the important question of the extent to which lab experiments on student populations can serve to identify the motivational forces present in society at large. We address this question by...

This paper studies the pro-social preferences of criminals by comparing the behavior of a group of prisoners in a lab experiment with the behavior of a benchmark group recruited from the general population. We find a striking similarity in the importance the two groups attach to pro-social...

The pari passu principle is the most prominent principle in the law of insolvency. We report from a lab experiment designed to study whether People find this principle a fair solution to the bankruptcy problem. The experimental design generates situations where participants work and accumulate...

We conduct a large-scale intercultural experiment to elicit competitiveness and ask whether individual and gender differences in competitiveness are partially determined by nature. We use being a “lefty” (i.e., having either a dominant left hand or a dominant left foot) as a proxy for...

We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15 000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. We find that the inclusion of a moral appeal or a sentence that increases the perceived probability of...

We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The main result is that it generates a strong and significant improvement in...

The ‘boy crisis' prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans. Our data provide strong evidence of a...