This paper explores whether the experience of a severe recession during early adulthood shapes individuals' prosocial attitudes. The analysis uses survey responses to experimentally validated questions that measure prosocial attitudes for approximately 65,000 respondents in 75 countries. The...

While in-service teacher training programs are designed to enhance the performance of several cohorts of students, there is little evidence on the persistence of their effects. We present the two-year results of a large-scale, randomized study of an intensive in-service teacher training program...

We study the age-dependent malleability of patience via educational interventions designed to foster financial decision-making capabilities and to induce a more future-oriented mindset. We conduct a field experiment covering both youths and adults in Uganda and aggregate evidence from earlier...

How do men and women differ in their persistence after experiencing failure in a competitive environment? We tackle this question by combining a large online experiment (N=2,086) with machine learning. We find that when losing is unequivocally due to merit, both men and women exhibit a...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial in a lab and natural setting to investigate whether exposure to nature leads people to behave more pro-environmentally. We further investigated whether attention restoration mediates this effect. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four...

Globally, governments increasingly rely on auctions to advance renewable energy. This paper studies the design of wind farm auctions and evaluates the impact of price guarantees and subsidies on auction efficiency, government revenue, and renewable-energy production. While the theoretical...

Governments, central banks, and private organizations frequently face the challenge of convincing their audience to take a specific action. One key choice is whether to send a public message that can coordinate the audience's actions or to rely instead on private messages that may differ across...

We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the UK (two similar Western societies) and Morocco and...

This paper provides experimental evidence on the electoral effect of a large education reform in a developing democracy. Despite significantly improving school quality, the policy reduced the incumbent party's presidential vote share by 3 percentage points (10%). This does not imply that voters...

We conducted a controlled experiment to study how different gender frames used in the instructions affect economic behavior. In our experiment, we systematically varied the framing of the instructions, either using the male, the female, or a gender-inclusive form. Participants played three...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

Political identity has become the strongest social divide within Western societies. This paper employs experiments to measure discrimination along multiple dimensions of social identity, and replicates previous findings showing the strongest discrimination against out-groups occurs in the...

Measuring the social preferences of economic agents using experiments has become common place. This process, while incentive compatible, is costly and time consuming, making it infeasible in many settings. We combine standard altruism and warm glow choice experiments with a battery of candidate...

This article examines disability discrimination in the hiring process and explores variation in how the intersection of disability and gender shapes employers' hiring behavior by occupational context and gender segregation. We use data from a field experiment in which approximately 2,000 job...

This study investigates the effects of unfair enforcement of institutional rules on public good contributions, personal and social norms, and trust. In a preregistered online experiment (n = 1,038), we find that biased institutions reduce rule compliance compared to fair institutions. However,...

This article presents a novel explanation why demand for redistribution on average does not respond to information on low intergenerational mobility. Building on insights from behavioral economics, we expect that incentives to update perceptions of intergenerational mobility change along the...

We investigate gender differences in individual credit claiming for teamwork. In a large-scale online experiment, participants work on an interactive task in teams of two and subsequently report their subjective contribution to the teamwork. In three between-subject treatments, we incentivize...

Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. We investigate a situation where one person possesses information that is inconvenient for another, and study why and when they decide to transmit that information. We introduce a...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

Teamwork has become increasingly important in modern organizations and the labor market. Yet little is known about the role of self-confidence in teamwork. In this paper, we present evidence from a laboratory experiment using a team effort task. Effort and ability are complements and there are...

Purpose This study aims to examine the effects of prior small-scale changes to wealth on subsequent risky choices. Design/methodology/approach The paper opted for a laboratory experiment in which subjects perform two sequences of risky tasks. In between these two sets, the author transfers money...

The COVID 19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the world, affecting not only physical health and the economy but also mental well being. This chapter provides an investigation of the causal link between lockdown measures a significant public health intervention and mental health. Our examination...

This article explores preconditions and developmental dynamics of institutional innovation in higher education organizations as an outcome of a collaborative educational initiative - a university-based experimental space. Such collaborative learning configurations are often designed to stimulate...

Trust and reciprocity promote cooperation and are key elements of a successful social life. This study investigated the framing effects on trust and reciprocity behaviors. Using an iterated one-shot within-subjects design, this study explored how trust and reciprocity decisions changed when the...

Adolescence is an important developmental period for both trust behavior and personality maturation, and individual differences in trust decisions may be related to different personality traits. In the current study, a group of adolescents (n = 483, Mage = 13.5, SDage = 0.4) played two...

Motivated reasoning refers to the idea that people hold certain beliefs about themselves or the world due to their desire to do so, rather than striving for accuracy. This type of belief formation can lead to overconfidence and polarization, as well as facilitate immoral behavior at both the...