According to social-psychological research, feelings of uncertainty in decision-making evoke two opposite responses: (i) reduction of uncertainty by information search, leading to less stereotyping of people, and hence less discrimination; (ii) social identification with an ingroup, inducing...

Bayesian Updating is the dominant theory of learning in economics. The theory is silent about how individuals react to events that were previously unforeseeable or unforeseen. Recent theoretical literature has put forth axiomatic frameworks to analyze the unknown. In particular, we test if...

Empirical studies have found that cannabis commonly precedes consumption of drugs like amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. As a result a causal linkage between cannabis and subsequent hard drug use has been hypothesized. Despite mixed empirical evidence and a limited understanding of...

Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMW to lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors. Consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, the effects on winners'...

This article experimentally examines voluntary contributions when group members' marginal returns to the public good vary. The experiment implements two marginal return types, low and high, and uses the information that members have about the heterogeneity to identify the applied contribution...

Research on employer learning has provided important insights into the dynamic process that determines individual wages, especially during the early part of a worker's career. However, the recent evidence on the absence of employer learning for college graduates by Arcidiacono et al. (2008) and...

This paper analyses the effect of information disseminated by the Internet on voting behavior. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder the roll-out of fixed-line broadband...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

We estimate the effect of publicly disseminated information about school-level achievement on students' mobility between elementary schools. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when poor school-level performance is revealed. In general, parents respond to information soon...