This paper characterizes heterogeneity of the beliefs of American households about future stock market returns, provides an explanation for that heterogeneity and establishes its relationship to stock holding behavior. We find substantial belief heterogeneity that is puzzling since households...

Previous research shows that firms shroud high add-on prices in competitive markets with naive consumers leading to inefficiency. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating naive consumers on equilibrium prices and welfare. Our model allows firms to shroud, unshroud, or...

I develop a model in which a child's acquisition of a given form of human capital incentivizes adults in his household to either learn from him (if children act as teachers then adults' cost of learning the skill falls) or lean on him (if children's human capital substitutes for that of adults...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks. The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (American Economic Review, forthcoming). We outline the...

Recent medical research shows that health is highly influential for learning and the ability to think laterally; however, past economic studies have failed to empirically examine the influence of health on learning, schooling, and ideas production; the main drivers of growth in endogenous growth...

Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both...

This paper addresses a key question on the design of electoral systems. Should all voters vote on the same day or should elections be staggered, with late voters observing early returns before making their decisions? Using a model of voting and social learning, we illustrate that sequential...

We study the effects of performance bonuses in immigrant language training for adults. A Swedish policy pilot conducted in 2009-2010 gave a randomly assigned group of municipalities the right to grant substantial cash bonuses to recently arrived migrants. The results suggest substantial effects...

In this paper we provide some evidence that repeat taking of competitive exams may reduce the impact of background disadvantages on educational outcomes. Using administrative data on the university entrance exam in Turkey we estimate cumulative learning between the first and the nth attempt...

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet...