A number of countries have begun implementing tax incentives designed to reverse the decline in fertility. Whether such incentives are effective or equitable remains an open question. During the early twentieth century, France initiated an unusual tax policy to promote fertility and marriage:...

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...

Understanding the nature of individual variation in speech, particularly the mechanism underlying such variability, is increasingly important, especially for research on sound change, since such investigations might help explain why sound change happens at all and, conversely, why sound change...

What are the consequences of intermediating moral responsibility through complex organizations or transactions? This paper examines whether individuals become less moral when they know their choices are obfuscated under randomization. It reports the results of a data entry experiment in an...

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...

We collect data on the record of every action in hundreds of derivative cases and merger class actions involving public companies filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery from 2004 to 2011. We use these data to analyze how markets respond to litigation in the most important court for corporate...

To build inputs for end-to-end machine learning estimates of the causal impacts of law, we consider the problem of automatically classifying cases by their policy impact. We propose and implement a semi-supervised multi-class learning model, with the training set being a hand-coded dataset of...