Madrassas (Islamic religious seminaries) have been alleged to be responsible for fostering Islamic extremism and violence, and for indoctrinating their students in narrow worldviews. However, we know very little about the behavior of Madrassa students, and how other groups in their communities...

This paper investigates how attitudes toward the United States are affected by the provision of information. We use an experimentally generated panel of attitudes, obtained by providing urban Pakistanis with fact-based statements describing the United States in either a positive or negative...

Gender discrimination in South Asia is a well-documented fact. However, gender is only one of an individual’s many identities. This paper investigates how gender discrimination depends on the social identities of interacting parties. We use an experimental approach to identify gender...

We investigate the determinants of students' university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences, expectations,...

Males and females are markedly different in their choice of college major. Two main reasons have been suggested for the gender gap: differences in innate abilities and differences in preferences. This paper addresses the question of how college majors are chosen, focusing on the underlying...

Social interdependence is believed to play an important role in how people make individual choices. This paper presents a simple model constructed on the premise that people are motivated by their own payoff as well as by how their actions compare with those of other people in their reference...

At least a quarter of college students in the United States graduate with more than one undergraduate major. This paper investigates how students decide on the composition of their paired majors - in other words, whether the majors chosen are substitutes or complements. Since students use both...

A pervasive concern with the use of subjective data in choice models is that the data are biased and endogenous. This paper examines the extent to which cognitive biases plague subjective data, specifically addressing 1) whether cognitive dissonance affects the reporting of beliefs, and 2)...

The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first ask respondents their self-beliefs - beliefs about their own expected earnings and other major-specific outcomes conditional on various majors, their population...