We use a series of controlled experiments, where we manipulate the information that men and women have, to investigate discrimination against women as sources of knowledge---epistemic discrimination---in ordinary daily life in rural north India. The experiments entail three testimonial...

A standard hypothesis in economics, the rational self-interest hypothesis, is based on a radically simplified view of human nature that says individuals are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest and unboundedly rational in the pursuit of it. Yet experimental evidence...

This paper is an attempt to broaden the standard economic discourse by importing insights into human behavior not just from psychology, but also from sociology and anthropology. Whereas the concept of the decision-maker is the rational actor in standard economics and, in early work in behavioral...

This paper assesses the role of ideas in economic change, combining economic and historical analysis with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology. Belief systems shape the system of categories ("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions (confirmatory bias), and are themselves...

How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have "stolen" assets cannot be...

When Russia launched mass privatization, it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law. That didn't happen. We present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may fail to...

Economists have generally argued that income redistribution comes at a cost in aggregate incomes. We provide a counter-example in a model where private information gives rise to incentive constraints. In the model, a wage tax creates the usual distortion in labor-leisure choices, but the grants...

This paper is an attempt to broaden economic discourse by importing insights into human behavior not just from psychology, but also from sociology and anthropology. Whereas in standard economics the concept of the decision-maker is the rational actor, and in early work in behavioral economics it...

All over the world, people are prevented from participating fully in society through mechanisms that go beyond the structural and institutional barriers that rational choice theory identifies (―poverty, exclusion by law or force, taste-based or statistical discrimination, and externalities...