How do firms motivate their employees to be productive? The conventional wisdom is that workers respond to monetary incentives—"Pay them more and they will work harder." However, a large and growing body of empirical evidence from laboratory and field experiments, surveys, and observational...

Survey and register data indicate that many employees prefer a socially responsible employer and will accept a lower wage to achieve this. Laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that socially responsible groups are more productive than others, partly because they attract cooperative...

As global migration flows increase, so do the number of migrant students in host country schools. Yet migrants' achievement scores lag well behind those of their native-born schoolmates. Performance gaps are explained largely by differences in migrant parents' socio-economic background, cultural...

In today’s globalized world, people are increasingly mobile and often need to communicate across different languages. Learning a new language is an investment in human capital. Migrants must learn the language of their destination country, but even non-migrants must often learn other languages...

Private charitable contributions play an essential role in most economies. Despite the existence of welfare states, people contribute money and supply volunteer labor to charity. From a policy perspective, there is concern that comprehensive government spending might crowd out these private...

Higher inequality reduces capital accumulation and increases the informal economy, which creates additional employment opportunities for low-skilled and deprived people. Despite this positive feedback, informality raises problems for public finances and biases official statistics, reducing the...

Charity rating agencies often focus on overhead cost ratios in evaluating charities, and donors appear to be sensitive to these measures when deciding where to donate. Yet, there appears to be a tenuous connection between this widely-used metric and a charity’s effectiveness. There is evidence...

In today's globalized world, people are increasingly mobile and often need to communicate across different languages. Learning a new language is an investment in human capital. Migrants must learn the language of their destination country, but even non-migrants must often learn other languages...

Higher inequality reduces capital accumulation and increases the informal economy, which creates additional employment opportunities for low-skilled and deprived people. As a result, informal employment leads to beneficial effects on income distribution by providing sources of income for...

Survey and register data indicate that many employees prefer a socially responsible employer and will accept a lower wage to achieve this. Laboratory experiments support the hypothesis that socially responsible groups are more productive than others, partly because they attract cooperative...