This study investigates how information on solicitors' compensation affects charitable giving in a door-to-door field experiment with more than 2,800 households. We vary whether solicitors are paid or not and the information about this compensation that potential donors receive. Relative to the...

Parental investments at early ages can shape children’s future educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages 3-5. Moreover, parents’ beliefs about their children’s reading and math abilities are higher for girls...

Despite the great deal of research on dynamic inconsistency in time preferences, few studies have ventured into investigating the question in a natural context. To address this gap, we conduct a natural field experiment with over 200 customers at a grocery store to investigate dynamic...

Direct mail fundraisers commonly provide a set of suggested donation amounts to potential donors, in addition to the option of writing in an amount. Yet little systematic evidence exists about the causal effects of suggested donation amounts on giving behavior. To this end, we conducted a field...

I examine the association between “Big Five” personality traits and voting in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election using an online panel of over 4,000 representative Americans. I find that personality has a strong, statistically significant association with voting intentions, even when...

Obesity rates have doubled in the last forty years, and a major cause is the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. In this paper, we identify channels through which information – about health benefits or taste - affects beverage choice. We conduct a field experiment in a school lunchroom...

We use field experiments in the employee giving program at Google to demonstrate that hassle costs inhibit donations to charity. Relative to the status-quo control condition involving donation by credit card on the charity's website, the treatment group received a simpler option to donate via...

Calling to thank donors is a key fundraising strategy in the non-profit sector. Yet the effectiveness of these calls remains untested. We report on field experiments with public television stations and a national non-profit in which new donors were randomized to receive a thank-you call or not....

Time preferences have been correlated with a range of life outcomes, yet little is known about their early development. We conduct a field experiment to elicit time preferences of over 1,200 children ages 3-12, who make several intertemporal decisions. To shed light on how such primitives form,...

In the past several decades the experimental method has lent deep insights into economics. One perhaps surprising area that has contributed is the experimental study of children, where advances as varied as the evolution of human behaviors that shape markets and institutions, to how early life...