Randomizing different schools of thought –via a month-long training– finds that training deputy ministers in effective altruism renders 0.4-0.6 standard deviations increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased mentalizing of others: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks...

Grit, a non-cognitive skill that indicates perseverance and passion for long-term goals, has been shown to predict academic achievement. This paper provides evidence that grit also predicts student outcomes during the challenging period of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use a unique behavioral...

Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. Judicial analytics can assess extra-legal factors that influence decisions. Behavioral anomalies in judicial decision-making offer an intuitive understanding of feature relevance, which can then be used...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of the law. While much theoretical work points to this possibility, no empirical work has investigated the claims, largely due to the rarity of trading in legal claims in modern systems...

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...

One of the most influential views of our time attributes a large part of the failure of development in the post-war period to group conflicts. Recent research in development economics has identified a large collection of policy innovations that would help the poor. But these policies often do...

We develop results for the use of Lasso and post-Lasso methods to form first-stage predictions and estimate optimal instruments in linear instrumental variables (IV) models with many instruments, p. Our results apply even when p is much larger than the sample size, n. We show that the IV...

In some online labor markets, workers are paid by the task, choose what tasks to work on, and have little or no interaction with their (usually anonymous) buyer/employer. These markets look like true spot markets for tasks rather than markets for employment. Despite appearances, we find via a...

In this introduction we will avoid laboring over a definition of the “Economics of Religion & Culture,” but this will not stop us from arguing that it is a burgeoning area of research. Work focusing on religious practice and related cultural issues dates back at least to Adam Smith, but...