A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the...

In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital...

While campaign finance reform attracts a lot of attention, it seems unlikely that such reform, at least in it current guise, will have a large impact on the functioning of the American political system. Recent studies have called into question the conventional wisdom that challenger campaign...

Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of...

Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990,...

In this introduction to the symposium, I first offer an overview of the spectrum of experimental methods in economics, from laboratory experiments to the field experiments that are the subject of this symposium. I then offer some thoughts about the potential gains from doing economic research...