This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically that geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference...

Are the effects of tax aversion on labor supply symmetric? In a real-effort online experiment, participants are exposed to manipulated wages and taxes after first experiencing the same reference wage. More participants change their labor supply when encountering a tax increase than when...

Loss aversion, risk aversion, and the probability weighting function (PWF) are three central concepts in explaining decisionmaking under risk. I examine interlinkages between these concepts in a model of decisionmaking that allows for loss averse/tolerant stochastic reference dependence and...

Evidence suggests that participants in direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanisms (DA) play dominated strategies. To explain the data, we introduce expectation-based loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choice-acclimating personal equilibria in DA. We find...

The evidence shows source-dependent entitlement to income sources and individuals are reluctant to part with income they feel more entitled to, e.g., earned labor income. Taxpayers may also be more reluctant to part with tax payments (evade more) from income sources they feel more entitled to- a...

This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits among individuals, a significant component of the differences in income inequality across societies can be attributed to...