According to the widely known 'culture of honor' hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records,...

What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that...

This chapter will cover recent research in historical economics that uses ethnographic data and data from surveys and lab experiments. The study of historical economics, particularly outside of non-Western countries, has been constrained by availability of historical data. However, recent work...

Behavioral constraints may explain part of low demand for preventive health products. We test the effects of two light-touch psychological interventions on water chlorination and related health and economic outcomes using a randomized controlled trial among 3750 women in rural Kenya. One...

We characterize trade policies that result from political competition when assessments of well-being include both material and psychosocial components. The material component reflects, as usual, satisfaction from consumption. Borrowing from social identity theory, we take the psychosocial...

We estimate the labor market return to an MBA, a JD, and master's in engineering, nursing, education, psychology and social work, and thirteen other graduate degrees. To control for heterogeneity in preferences and ability, we use fixed effects for combinations of field-specific undergraduate...

A number of studies - including our own - find a mid-life dip in well-being. We review a psychology literature that claims that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a decline it is "trivial". We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries and US...

We propose a model of optimal decision making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention; but our theory differs from that of Sims (2003) in not assuming costless memory...

We conduct beauty contest experiments, using close to 2,000 subjects to study the facial traits of CEOs. In one experiment we use pairs of photographs and find that subjects rate CEO faces as appearing more "competent" and less "likable" than non-CEO faces. Another experiment matches CEOs from...