Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a...

Using cultural transmission, we develop a model that gives some microfoundation to the impact of residential neighborhood on children's educational attainment and then test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that, for high-educated parents, the better the quality of the...

As China exhibited unprecedented rapid economic growth ever since its reform andopenness, the development and sources of labor productivity has gradually come to theforefront. This paper studies the development and the source of labor productivity in 31Chinese provinces during the period of...

This paper analyzes data from a novel field experiment designed to test the impact of twodifferent insurance products and a secret saving device on solidarity in risk-sharing groupsamong rural villagers in the Philippines. Risk is simulated by a lottery. Risk-sharing ispossible in solidarity...

There is a longstanding concern that material incentives might undermine prosocial motivation, leading to a decrease in blood donations rather than an increase. This paper provides an empirical test of how material incentives affect blood donations in a large-scale field experiment spanning...

Many policy makers and economists argue that financial literacy is key to financial well-being. But why do many individuals remain financially illiterate despite the apparent importance of being financially informed? This paper presents results of a field study linking individual decisions to...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

Carefully-matched pairs of written job applications were made to test for age discrimination inhiring. A twenty-one year-old and a thirty-nine year-old woman applied for jobs where a newgraduate was sought; men aged twenty-seven and forty-seven, inquired about employmentas waiters; women aged...

Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. Yet, there is no evidence whetherpeople who are loss averse in riskless choices are also loss averse in risky choices. Wemeasure individual-level loss aversion in riskless choices in an endowment effect experimentby eliciting both WTA and...

We present results from a field experiment testing the gift-exchange hypothesis inside a treeplantingfirm paying its workforce incentive contracts. Firm managers told a crew of treeplanters they would receive a pay raise for one day as a result of a surplus not attributable topast planting...