Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. Here we study how the exogenous assignment to different positions in an extreme social hierarchy – the caste system – affects individuals'...

One of the most fruitful advances in modern economics has been the introduction of psychological realism into the model of"economic man."The World Development Report 2015 organizes the evidence about how humans actually think and make decisions into a coherent framework useful for designing...

Behavioral economics recognizes that mental models -- intuitive sets of ideas about how things work -- can bias an individual's perceptions of himself and the world. By representing an ascriptive category of people as unworthy, a mental model can foster unjust social exclusion of, for example, a...

It is typically assumed that being hard-working or clever is a trait of the person, in the sense that it is always there, in a fixed manner. However, in an experiment with 288 high-caste and 294 low-caste students in India, cues to one's place in the caste system turned out to starkly influence...

It is typically assumed that being hard-working or clever is a trait of the person, in the sense that it is always there, in a fixed manner. However, in an experiment with almost 600 boys in India, cues to one's place in the traditional caste order turn out to influence the expression of these...

Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. This paper studies how the exogenous assignment to different positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system - affects...

This article surveys an influential new research program on historical paths of institutional development and their consequences for growth. The research program exploits the experience of European colonialism as a kind of "natural experiment" whose results bear on the way institutions affect...