Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects - capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin colony,...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their...

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

We study the effect of legal constraints in an environment in which agents face demand shocks they would like to smooth but also have weakness of will: agents' long and short run preferences are misaligned. Some agents are sophisticated--they know they will make inconsistent intertemporal...

While competition between firms producing substitutes is well understood, less is known about rivalry between complementors. We study the interaction between firms in markets with one-way essential complements. One good is essential to the use of the other but not vice versa, as arises with an...

Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated, with roughly six hundred thousand to be released this year. Despite this, little is known about the effects of confinement on the post-release lives of inmates. Focusing on post-release criminal activity, we identify the effect of prison...

We develop a simple methodology to estimate the returns to education despite heterogeneous labor/leisure preferences. The labor supply behavior of doctors and physician assistants is consistent with people choosing between the two careers based on differing tastes for leisure.

Prediction markets now cover many important political events. The 2004 presidential election featured an active online prediction market at Intrade.com, where securities addressing many different election-related outcomes were traded. Using the 2004 data from this market, we examined three...

Recent literature finds that women earn significantly lower returns to professional degrees. Does this render these degrees poor investments for women? We compare physicians to physician assistants, a similar profession with lower wages and training costs, mitigating some selection issues. The...