People respond to those who ask. Within the charitable fundraising community, the power of the ask represents the backbone of most fundraising strategies. Despite this, the optimal design of communication strategies has received less formal attention. For their part, economists have recently...

We investigate whether the field of study influences university students' political attitudes. To disentangle self-selection from learning effects, we first investigate whether the fields of study chosen by the incoming students correlate with their political attitudes. In a second step we...

This paper characterizes efficient tax subsidies for charitable contributions, and considers the properties of potential reforms. Contributions are underprovided in the absence of subsidies, and are misdirected if subsidies fail to account for all of the costs that donors incur. It is costly for...

We report an experiment comparing sequential and simultaneous contributions to a public good in a quasi-linear two-person setting (Varian, Journal of Public Economics, 1994). Our findings support the theoretical argument that sequential contributions result in lower overall provision than...

Decisions to donate time or money for charitable purposes are typically seen as make-or-buy decisions, implying that there should be a clear distinction between individuals engaging in one of these two forms of giving and that this distinction should be somehow linked to opportunity costs. But...

This paper studies how a preference for consistency can affect economic decision-making. We propose a two-period model where people have a preference for consistency because consistent behavior allows them to signal personal and intellectual strength. We then present three experiments that study...