This paper presents novel stylized facts about the global variation in universalism, leveraging nationally representative surveys across 60 countries (N=64,000). We find large variation in universalism within and across countries, which almost entirely reflects heterogeneity in people’s moral...

In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people's normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral philosophy...

Can lab experiments on student populations serve to identify the motivational forces present in society at large? We address this question by conducting, to our knowledge, the first study of social preferences that brings a nationally representative population into the lab, and we compare their...

Many political issues like abortion, gay marriage or assisted suicide are strongly contested because individuals have preferences not only over their own choice but also about other individuals? actions. How should society decide these issues? This paper compares three regimes (centralization,...

Some markets are prone to develop shadow transactions for the purpose of tax avoidance. Moral sentiments control the allocation of consumers between the legal and illicit markets. Such sentiments include self-esteem and social disapproval. The market solution leads to fiscal externality...

The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. An encompassing understanding of the virtues and vices of markets, including their possible impact on moral values, is necessary...

Ignorance enables individuals to act immorally. This is well known in policy circles, where there is keen interest in lowering moral ignorance. In this paper, we study the (in)elasticity of moral ignorance, with respect to monetary incentives, social norms messages and moral context. We propose...

Throughout the Western world, people's policy preferences are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. Based on a simple model, we propose that what partly explains the particular internal structure of political ideology is heterogeneity in moral universalism: the extent to...

Literature in economics and psychology on moral behaviour explores the contexts in which people act in ways that are consistent or inconsistent with their past actions. Such inconsistencies appear to violate economists' assumption of rational consumer behaviour. In this note we show that a...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...