A growing literature in economics examines the development of preferences among children and adolescents. We combine a repeated dictator game with treatments that either provides participants with information about the average behavior of others or not. In a sample of 384 children aged 5-17, we...

In his seminal 1970 book, The Gift Relationship, Richard Titmuss argued that monetary compensation for donating blood might crowd out the supply of blood donors. To test this claim we carry out a field experiment with three different treatments. In the first treatment subjects are given the...

We study the motives behind parents’ transfers to their children, and the relationship between tangible transfers and educational investments. Another issue is the channels parents choose for tangible transfers. Do they use bequests and inter vivos gifts as substitutes or complements? We use a...

I show that a simple formal model of reciprocal altruism is able to predict human behavior in contracting situations, puzzling when considered within selfishness assumption. For instance, motivation and performance crowding-out are explained by a signaling mechanism in which provision of an...

The paper studies the interaction between two kinds of incentives: career concerns and intrinsic motivation emerging from agent’s alignment with organization’s objectives or another source of organizational involve- ment. The information on both skills and involvement can be asymmetric and...

The paper studies the impact of altruism on Agent’s motivation in the career concerns model. I show that career concerns incentive is lessened by altruism. As a consequence, altruism can decrease effort, though conventional wisdom suggests that effort should always be higher for the more...

Empirical studies of intergenerational transfers usually find that bequests are equally divided among heirs while inter vivos gifts tend to be compensatory. Using the 1992 and 1994 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we find that only 4% of parents who give, divide their gifts equally...