We randomly vary religious identity salience in laboratory subjects to test how identity salience contributes to six hypothesized links from prior literature between religious identity and economic behavior. We find that religious identity salience makes Protestants increase contributions to...

To test the causal impact of religiosity, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program that consisted of 15 weekly half-hour sessions. We analyze outcomes for 6,276 ultra-poor Filipino households six months after the program...

Using novel microdata, we document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation: a massive reallocation of resources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual framework in which the introduction of religious competition shifts...

We investigate the rise of the religious right in the context of the Moral Majority and Jimmy Carter, the first Evangelical President. During Carter's Presidency, the Moral Majority, an Evangelical group headed by televangelist Jerry Falwell, turned against the incumbent Carter, a Democrat, and...

This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features,...

We characterize investors' moral preferences in a parsimonious experimental setting, where we auction stocks with various ethical features. We find strong evidence that investors seek to align their investments with their social values ("value alignment"), and find no evidence of behavior driven...

Economics and ethics both offer important perspectives on our society, but they do so from two different viewpoints - the central focus of economics is how the price system in our economy values resources; the central focus of ethics is the moral evaluation of actions in our society. The rise of...

Throughout the Western world, people's policy views are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. This paper proposes that what partly explains the structure of ideology is moral universalism: the extent to which people's altruism and trust remain constant as social distance...

Ethics in social science experimentation and data collection are often discussed but rarely articulated in writing as part of research outputs. Although papers typically reference human subjects research approvals from relevant institutional review boards, most recognize that such boards are not...

Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...