While effective preventive measures against COVID-19 are now widely known, many individuals fail to adopt them. This paper provides experimental evidence about one potentially important driver of compliance with social distancing: social norms. We asked each of 23,000 survey respondents in...

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are an important weapon against contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influences adoption by conducting a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to...

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are an important weapon against contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influences adoption by conducting a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to...

Can societies be nudged to adopt beneficial behaviors? Publicizing how people behave on average-descriptive-norms nudging-has emerged as a key tool for increasing the adoption of desirable behaviors. While nudging, by describing social norms, has proven effective in one-shot interventions in...

Can societies be nudged to adopt beneficial behaviors? Publicizing how people behave on average-descriptive-norms nudging-has emerged as a key tool for increasing the adoption of desirable behaviors. While nudging, by describing social norms, has proven effective in one-shot interventions in...

Corruption, vote buying, and other sensitive topics are difficult to study because people tend to under-report them in surveys. The degree of under-reporting bias has been shown to vary across studies, contexts, and question structures, but no systematic explanation for the variation has been...

While digital platforms have facilitated protests and challenged democratic norms, mass online campaigns could also enhance electoral accountability. We evaluate the electoral impact of non-partisan Facebook ads informing millions of Mexican citizens of municipal expenditure irregularities in...

Is culture a lasting driver of corruption? I study whether normative attitudes towards bribery persist through generational change. To disentangle cultural from institutional causes, I compare individuals who share an institutional environment but whose parents were born abroad. I find evidence...

Screening potential entrants is a major challenge to any system of immigration, and has become particularly salient in the Trump era. At bottom, the problem is one of information asymmetry, in which migrants hold private information as to their abilities and intentions. We propose a new approach...