Crime has to be punished, but does punishment reduce crime? We conduct a neutrally framed laboratory experiment to test the deterrence hypothesis, namely that crime is weakly decreasing in deterrent incentives, i.e. severity and probability of punishment. In our experiment, subjects can steal...

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous...

Consider a situation where person A undertakes a costly action that benefits person B. This behavior seems altruistic. However, if A expects a reward in return from B, then A's action may be motivated by the expected rewards rather than by pure altruism. The question we address in this...

We implement the Rawlsian thought experiment of a veil of ignorance in the laboratory which introduces risk and possibly social preferences. We find that both men and women react to the risk introduced by the veil of ignorance. Only the women additionally exhibit social preferences that reflect...

This paper analyzes whether there exists a causal relationship between parental employment and children's educational attainment. We address potential endogeneity problems due to (i) selection of parents in the labor market by estimating a model on sibling differences and (ii) reverse causality...