This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...

This paper provides experimental evidence showing that indirectreciprocity may important in economic decision making and in thedevelopment of group norms. We study a `repeated helping game' withrandom pairing in large groups, with individuals equally dividedbetween donors and recipients. Donors...

This paper develops a conception of personal identity for Amartya Sen's capability framework that emphasizes his self-scrutinizing aspect of the self and related concept of commitment, and compares this conception to the co1lective intentionality-based one advanced in Davis (2003c). The paper...

This paper develops a model in which individuals gain social status among their peers for being 'tough' by committing violent acts. We show that a high penalty for moderately violent acts (zero-tolerance) may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both moderate and extreme violence. The...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...