We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialization affect ingroup favoritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in...

The emergence of competition is a defining aspect of human nature and characterizes many important social environments. However, its relationship with how social groups are formed has received little attention. We design an experiment to analyze how individuals' willingness to compete is...

This article relies on a large-scale field experiment in Mexico to measure the effects of two ability-grouping models (tracking and heterogeneous/bimodal groups) on student learning outcomes during middle school. Both strategies yielded an average learning gain of 0.08 of a standard deviation....

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

The paper investigates determinants of investments in state capacity and institutional change in contemporary Ukraine. After formulating a simple sequential two-stage model of investments in state capacity, the paper estimates autoregressive distributed lag and vector autoregressive models to...

We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...