Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members' views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar's burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both personality traits...

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives - as present in relevant economic decisions - on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate neglect, anchoring, failure...

Interventions to promote learning are often categorized into supply- and demand-side approaches. In a randomized experiment to promote learning about COVID-19 among Mozambican adults, we study the interaction between a supply and a demand intervention, respectively: 1) teaching, and 2) providing...

Before 1979, unemployment insurance (UI) benefits were not treated as taxable income in the United States. Several economists criticized this policy on the ground that not taxing UI benefits while taxing earned income allegedly encourages unemployed persons to conduct longer than socially...

Many provisions of the Social Security Program distort an individual's labor supply incentives. In particular, the payroll tax, the earnings test, the offsetting actuarial adjustment, and the dependence of the size of future benefits on the level of current earnings all affect the net return to...

This paper shows that, contrary to commonly held views, the provisions of the social security law actually provide strong work incentives for older men. The reason is that, for most workers, higher current earnings lead to higher future social security benefits. These incentives have been...

In this paper, we analyze the association between financial incentives and retirement decisions using aggregate data for over four decades in Spain. We calculate an implicit tax rate on remaining in employment for an additional year and examine its correlation with employment rates for older...

Belief elicitation is central to inference on economic decision making. The recently introduced Binarized Scoring Rule (BSR) is heralded for its robustness to individuals holding risk averse preferences and for its superior performance when eliciting beliefs. Consequently, the BSR has become the...

A large and growing literature shows that attention-increasing interventions, such as reminders and planning prompts, can promote important behaviors. This paper develops a method to investigate whether people value attention-increasing tools rationally. We characterize how the demand for...

In 2010, we informed a random set of Delhi councilors, some ineligible for re-election in their current ward, that a newspaper would report on their performance shortly prior to the 2012 city elections. Using slum dwellers' spending preferences, we created a councilor-specific index of pro-poor...