Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

Discrimination against minorities is pervasive in many societies, but little is known about minorities' strategies to avoid being discriminated against. In our trust game among 758 high-school students in the country of Georgia, ethnic Georgian trustors discriminate against the ethnic Armenian...

We present direct evidence on the link between children’s patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find...

Large, macroeconomic shocks in the past have been shown to influence economic decisions in the present. We study in an experiment with 743 subjects whether small-scale, seemingly negligible, events also affect the formation of risk preferences. In line with a reinforcement learning model, we...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy by creating many uncompetitive legislative districts, and generating the very real possibility that a party that wins a clear majority of the popular vote does not win a majority of districts. We present a new approach to the determination of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different approaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

We study the labor market outcomes of a deregulation reform in Germany that removed licensing requirements to become self-employed in some occupations. Using longitudinal social security data, we implement a matched difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to account for...