In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an...

Happiness is strongly associated with goal attainment, productivity, mental health and suicidal risk. This paper examines the effect of satisfaction with areas of life on subjective well-being (SWB), the importance of relative perceptions compared to absolute measures in predicting overall life...

In this paper we study optimal choices of self-selection into politics and commitment once in office on the part of citizens with heterogeneous abilities and heterogeneous motivations. Politicians can moonlight, i.e., they can work in the market sector while appointed in parliament. Our...

This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of "multi-directedness," whereby people's preferences depend on their psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives....

This paper seeks to extend the domain of identity economics by exploring motivational foundations of in-group cooperation and out-group competition. On this basis, we explore the reflexive interaction between individual economic decisions and social identities in response to technological change...

We study attitudes to education among English adolescents. Using PISA data, we show there is considerable variation in these attitudes depending on background: immigrant students have substantially and significantly more positive attitudes to school than native children, a difference that...