Purpose – The paper aims to discover the role of the middle classes in the development of the ethnic minorities of China, given the importance of the middle classes in international economic development in the modern age. Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a definition of the...

Purpose – The paper aims to discover the role of the middle classes in the development of the ethnic minorities of China, given the importance of the middle classes in international economic development in the modern age. Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a definition of the...

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals' range of trading partners. This paper aims at understanding the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present....

We use a lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate intra-couple labor supply decisions and the division of housework under individual and joint income taxation systems. In order to eliminate problems of endogenous intra-couple time use decisions, we exogenously varied not only the taxation...

A central assumption of the canonical cheap talk literature is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Recent evidence from laboratory experiments with student subjects suggests, however, that while many people do report the payoff-maximizing...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...

Using a specially designed experiment, we investigate whether and how interdependence in risk exposure i.e., risk taking by some members of a potential risk sharing group affecting not only their own but also their co-members risk exposure, affects both risk taking and ex post sharing. The...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how robustly they explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

We formalize the optimal design of experiments when there is interference between units, i.e. an individual's outcome depends on the outcomes of others in her group. We focus on randomized saturation designs, two-stage experiments that first randomize treatment saturation of a group, then...

We report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second,...