The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated federal charitable giving incentives for roughly 20 percent of US income-tax payers. We study the impact of this on giving. Basic theory and our empirical results suggest heterogeneous effects for taxpayers with different amounts of itemizable expenses....

COVID-19 vaccines are widely available in wealthy countries, yet many people remain unvaccinated. Understanding the effectiveness -- or lack thereof -- of popular vaccination campaign strategies is therefore critical. In this paper, we report results from two studies that tested strategies...

We study whether Amazon engages in self-preferencing on its marketplace by favoring its own brands (e.g., Amazon Basics) in search. To address this question, we collect new micro-level consumer search data using a custom browser extension installed by a panel of study participants. Using this...

Research on the causal effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments and tracking effects over extended periods. We analyze a long-running field experiment of online advertising in which a random 0.5% subset of all users...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to rank them. For...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of the nexus between long-term care insurance (LTCI), formal care, informal (family) care, and bequests. In our empirical analysis, we use micro data from the Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and...

What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. Here, we introduce a new, overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

We investigate how locus of control beliefs - the extent to which individuals attribute control over events in their life to themselves as opposed to outside factors - affect prosocial behavior and the private provision of public goods. We begin by developing a conceptual framework showing how...