We study the effects of an unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children. The program allocated $1,076 to randomly selected households in rural Kenya. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children from 1,687 households with survey questions and incentivized...

Team incentives are important in many compensation systems that pay workers according to the output of their team as well as to their own output, with team bonuses often depending on whether the team meets or exceeds specified thresholds. Yet little is known about how team members with different...

The distinct historical and cultural experiences of American blacks and whites may influence whether members of those groups perceive a particular exchange as fair. We investigate racial differences in fairness standards using preferences for equal treatment in the ultimatum game, where...

We investigate the determinants of giving in a lab-in-the-field experiment with large stakes. Study participants in urban Mozambique play dictator games where their counterpart is the closest person to them outside their household. When given the option, dictators do a large fraction of giving...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

Which income group is pro-globalization or anti-globalization--the wealthy skilled-labor or the poor low-skilled labor? How globalization affect income-based attitudes towards globalization? The paper addresses these issues in the framework of a small open economy which trades in goods and...

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on...

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...