Families in poverty face numerous barriers to establishing stable economic footing. This paper examines the effect of a holistic, individualized wrap-around service intervention on outcomes for low-income individuals. The intervention includes a detailed assessment, an individualized service...

Healthy food choices are a canonical example used to illustrate the importance of time preferences in behavioral economics. However, the literature lacks a direct demonstration that they are well-predicted by incentivized time preference measures. We offer direct evidence by combining a novel,...

Do jobs and income-transfer programs affect crime? The answer depends on why one is asking the question, which shapes what one means by "crime." Many studies focus on understanding why overall crime rates vary across people, places, and time; since 80% of all crimes are property offenses, that's...

We examine the labor supply effects of short-term income transfers for families experiencing a housing crisis. We link callers of an emergency assistance homelessness prevention hotline to their federal tax records and measure their employment & earnings in years surrounding their calls. Our...

This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again - social scientists of different...

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...

Institutional constraints to counter potential abuses in the use of political power have been viewed as essential to well functioning political institutions and good public policy outcomes in the Western World since the time of ancient Greece. A sophisticated intellectual tradition emerged to...

Can ideas mobilize people into collective action? We provide a positive answer to this question by studying how exposure to the Communist ideology shaped an individual's choice to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the party's formative stage. The individuals we focus on are cadets at...

This paper analyzes whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people's willingness to finance a public good depends on their...

We propose a framework to explain why some societies may end up with different constitutional solutions to the problem of maintaining order in the face of self-interested behavior. Though the salient intellectual tradition since Hobbes has focused on how institutional design is used to eradicate...