Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of severity and certainty of punishment. This paper presents the first controlled experiment to study a third important factor that has been mainly overlooked: the swiftness of formal sanctions. We...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...

Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that individuals are sensitive to whether their actions are observable and what the downstream consequences of observability are. We connect three streams of literature (social preferences, behavior change, and social norms) to investigate the...