Democrats and liberals are generally understood to be more caring and kind than Republicans and conservatives; for example, even conservative author and media personality Ben Wattenberg has acknowledged that "the word ‘conservative’ conjures up images of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, while...

Recent empirical studies from across the social and behavioral sciences find that social capital is associated with various measures of well-being, including economic growth (Stephen Knack and Phillip Keefer 1997) and mortality (Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy and Kimberly Lochner 1997). These...

We examine the extent to which religious affiliation and participation are associated with other-regarding behavior in canonical public goods and bi-lateral trust games. In general, religious affiliation is unrelated to behavior in these experiments; further, there is only weak evidence that...

Prior studies suggest that hospital care is countercyclical among Medicare beneficiaries, and if anything, procyclical among the non-elderly. In this paper, we provide the first physician-level analysis of changes in healthcare provision to Medicare and privately insured patients across the...

Several non-experimental studies claim that heterogeneity among individuals reduces trust. A few experimental studies have examined the effects of naturally-occurring differences among subjects on trusting behavior, and in contrast, most have not supported these claims. We adopt a novel approach...

We conduct a large-scale economics experiment paired with a survey to examine the association between individual risk preference and health-related behaviors among adults aged 18 to 87 years. Risk preference is measured by the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery choice experiment. Controlling for...

Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, together with the Putnam (2000) index, to examine several key aspects...

Several recent studies demonstrate a positive effect of cigarette prices and taxes on obesity among adults, especially those who smoke. If higher cigarette costs affect smokers' weights by increasing calories consumed or increasing food expenditures, then cigarette taxes and prices may also...