We investigate the link between leadership, beliefs and pro-social behavior. This link is interesting because field evidence suggests that people's behavior in domains like charitable giving, tax evasion, corporate culture and corruption is influenced by leaders (CEOs, politicians) and beliefs...

We study the effects of voluntary participation on public good provision. Voluntary participation may foster cooperation through two mechanisms: an entry mechanism, which leads to assortative selection of interaction partners, or an exit mechanism, whereby the opportunity to leave the...

We provide a framework to uncover behavioural mechanisms driving potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. We deploy our framework in one-shot public goods experiments in the US and the UK, and in Morocco and Turkey. We find that cooperation is higher in the US and UK than...

We study the interplay between leading-by-example and group identity in a public goods game experiment. A common identity between the leader and her followers is beneficial for cooperation: average contributions are more than 30% higher than in a treatment where no identity was induced. In two...

Building on findings showing that laws exert a causal effect on social norms, this paper investigates whether this "expressive power of law" differs by gender or race. We develop a model to show that such differences are theoretically plausible. We then use an incentivized vignette experiment to...

People contribute more to public goods, the more others give (“crowding-in”). We investigate two possible causes of crowding-in: reciprocity, the usual explanation, and conformism, a neglected alternative. The issue is important since conformism has more scope to bring about endogenous...