Some theories about the positive impact of markets on morality suggest that competition increases empathy, not between competitors, but between them and third parties. However, empathy may be a necessary evolutionary antecedent to guile, which is when someone knows what the other person wants...

Scholars since Hume and Smith have debated possible causal connections between market experiences and moral beliefs. Here, I study the impact of market interactions on utilitarian versus deontological values, other-regarding preferences, and charitable donations. Through a labor market...

Is it justified for states to appropriate private property rights? If so, should governments regulate or expropriate? Competing models predict that government power of appropriation causes underinvestment, over investment, and growth. We use random assignment of U.S. federal court judges setting...

Turning to courts to vindicate rights often led to resistance and subsequent acceptance.We formalize these effects in a model where laws can generate temporary backlash. We then exploit two layers of judge randomization to estimate effects of abortion jurisprudence using all abortion appellate...

I find that judges assign 8% longer sentences to defendants whose first initials match their own. Name letter effects amplify when the first and second letter of the name match, when the entire name matches, when the name letter is rare, and appear for roughly all judges. The effects are larger...

Does obscenity law corrode moral values and does it matter? Using random judge assignment and all U.S. obscenity precedents since 1958, we present four main results. Progressive laws liberalized sexual attitudes and behaviors, reduced child abuse, but increased asymptomatic STDs. We document...

Ambiguity aversion is the interpretation of the experimental finding (Ellsberg paradox) that most subjects prefer betting on events whose probabilities are known (objective) to betting on events whose probabilities are unknown (subjective). However in typical experiments these unknown...

Most papers that employ the strategy method (SM) use many observations per subject to study responses to rare or off-equilibrium behavior that cannot be observed using direct elicitation (DE), but ignore that the strategic equivalence between SM and DE holds for the monetary payoff game but not...

Is labor market gender inequality due to physiological differences, labor market choices, or discrim- ination? Using novel data on all workplace sexual harassment appellate precedent from 1982-2002 and randomly assigned judges, we find that pro-plaintiff sexual harassment precedent reduced...