We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

People’s value for their own time is a key input in evaluating public policies: evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive...

Large-scale agricultural investments (LSAIs) typically depend on strong formal institutions and market-oriented intensive farming, whereas informal institutions tend to characterize the traditional villages located around them. We investigate changes to social capital in such villages when LSAIs...

Whereas exchange asymmetries for goods are well known, we provide a first incentivized test of exchange asymmetries for bads (i.e., items yielding a negative utility). On the one hand, prospect theory predicts an endowment effect for goods and bads, on the other hand, attention-based theories...

Attitudes toward risk underlie virtually every important economic decision an individual makes. In this experimental study, I examine how introducing a time delay into the execution of an investment plan influences individuals' risk preferences. The field experiment proceeded in three stages: a...

We use a field experiment in Bangladesh to test if two types of variety-specific fertilizer recommendations---government provided, community-level recommendations and plot-specific recommendations based on individual soil tests---affect fertilizer use, yield, and profits. Treatment farmers do...

Increasing evidence shows the significance of de jure land ownership in determining agricultural productivity. Yet, causal evidence of the effectiveness of land rights is scarce. We leverage experimental variation induced by nudging Indian farmers to obtain formal land titles. We find that...