I develop a model of (individually rational) collective reality denial in groups, organizations and markets. Whether participants' tendencies toward wishful thinking reinforce or dampen each other is shown to hinge on a simple and novel mechanism. When an agent can expect to benefit from other's...

We review the fast-growing work on salience and economic behavior. Psychological research shows that salient stimuli attract human attention "bottom up" due to their high contrast with surroundings, their surprising nature relative to recalled experiences, or their prominence. The Bordalo,...

We find large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught...

This paper is a non-technical and somewhat philosophical essay, that seeks to investigate the relationship between economics and reality. More precisely, it asks how reality in the form empirical evidence does or does not influence economic thinking and theory. In particular, which role do...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

lobbying (internal organization vs. trade association) by firms in administrative agencies. It explores the power and limitations of the collective action theories and transaction cost theories in explaining lobbying. It introduces a dataset of over 900 lobbying contacts cover 101 issues at the...

This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the determinants of group formation and of the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or ethnicity. We are especially interested in whether and how much the degree of heterogeneity in...

We develop a framework of group corruption via back-door negotiations between an outside initiator and an authority of decision-makers in a hierarchical organization. We examine the role played by the architecture of a multi-tier authority and determine under such a structure how bargaining...

Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Each person's sanitation behavior can affect the health of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we randomized (1) either...

This paper studies the determination of income taxes in a dynamic setting with human capital accumulation. The goal is to understand the factors that support an outcome without complete redistribution, given a majority of relatively poor agents. In the analysis, the internal dynamics of income...