The Cold War division of Korea, regarded as a natural experiment in institutional change, provides a unique opportunity to examine whether institutions affect social preferences. We recruited North Korean refugees and South Korean students to conduct laboratory experiments eliciting social...

Are workers in modern economies working too hard – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime...

Does single motherhood adversely affect infant health? This question is not easy to answer because of the endogeneity of coresidence during pregnancy. In this paper, we exploit quasi-natural variation in single motherhood from the moment of conception to that of birth arising from marriageable...

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance – in favour of boys – across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain...

The leading evidence against the unitary household models is that "who gets what" is significantly dependent upon "who earns how much." However, it is difficult to pin down the causal effect of relative earnings on intra-household resource allocation because households jointly decide both labor...

The quality of subjective performance evaluation is dependent on the incentive structures faced by evaluators, in particular on how they are monitored and themselves evaluated. Figure skating competitions provide a unique opportunity to study subjective evaluation. This paper develops and tests...

This study consistently estimates the trade-off between child quantity and quality by exploiting exogenous variation in fertility due to son preferences. Under son preferences, childbearing and fertility timing are determined conditional on the first child's gender. For the sample of South...

This study examines whether people optimally respond to prize incentives for risk taking in tournaments. I exploit the television game show World Poker Tour as a natural experiment. The results show that professional players strategically choose the degree of risk taking depending on the...

This study examines whether viewers of the popular television show, American Idol, are racially biased. I find strong evidence for same-race preferences, in particular among black viewers. Featuring more black contestants attracts more black households to tune in to watch the show. And, with...

Social commentators have pointed to problems of workers who face time stress an absence of sufficient time to accomplish all their tasks. An economic theory views time stress as reflecting how tightly the time constraint binds households. Time stress will be more prevalent in households with...