We investigate how the intensity of Ramadan affects educational outcomes by exploiting spatio-temporal variation in annual fasting hours. Longer fasting hours are related to increases in student performance in a panel of TIMMS test scores (1995–2019) across Muslim countries but not other...

Social identity has become accepted as a key concept underpinning the endogeneity of economic behaviour and preferences. It is important in explaining attitudes towards redistribution and pro-social behaviour. We examine how economic theory measures social identity and its effects on preferences...

Consumer boycotts often provide a disciplinary mechanism against firms deviating from established social norms. Such actions tend to be organized by people through reference groups with a social mission. The intensity of the group identity is, however, private information. Therefore, the...

We investigate the consequences of a peaceful shift of power from one social group to another. Theoretically, we show that an individual's decision to stay put or migrate depends on the difference between the political preferences of groups and the change in tax. Empirically, we use the case of...

We propose a theoretical model that embeds social identity concerns, as in Akerlof and Kranton (2000), with inequity averse preferences, as in Fehr and Schmidt (1999). We conduct an artefactual ultimatum game experiment with registered members of British political parties, for whom political...

Nudges and behavioral interventions have become a popular tool to stimulate prosocial behavior. Little is known, however, on how to design effective social interventions in contexts in which the descriptive norm is low, i.e. when a desirable behavior is only practiced by a minority within the...

While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding increasing social polarization based on partisan identity, there has been little analysis of how social polarization impacts voting. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model of political...

We explore the relation between social political identity and prosociality. We first construct a theoretical model to generate predictions for the behavior of players in an ultimatum game who are influenced by social political identity. Then we use a novel subject pool-registered members of...

The neoclassical model in economics envisages humans as amoral and self-regarding (Econs). This model, also known as the homo-economicus model, is not consistent with the empirical evidence. In light of the evidence, the continued use of the homo-economicus model is baffling. It also stymies...

The subject of this paper is how the epistemic limitations of individuals and their biases in reasoning affect collective decisions and in particular the functioning of democracies. In fact, while the cognitive sciences have largely shown how the imperfections of human rationality shape...