This paper develops a theory in which heterogeneity in political preferences produces a partisan disagreement about objective facts. A political decision involving both idiosyncratic preferences and scientific knowledge is considered. Voters form motivated beliefs in order to improve their...

Human reasoning is accompanied by meta-cognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty of recall and thought generation and the fluency with which new information can be processed. These experiences are informative in their own right. They can serve as a basis of judgment in addition...

Explanations of attitudes towards immigration include those that take a utilitarian perspective, focusing on immigration's real-world impacts, and others that look at immigration attitudes from the point of view of ideological affiliation. Focusing on the German "migration crisis" as a case...

This study examined the extent to which education levels in the 19th century have shaped current norms, which influence individuals' present-day non-cognitive skills and perceptions of life. Cross-country, individual-level data were compared with each country's average years of schooling in...

The paper studies how social job finding networks affect firms' selection of employees and the setting of entry wages. Our point of departure is the Montgomery (1991) model of employee referrals which suggests that it is optimal for firms to hire new workers through referrals from their most...

We study empirically whether there is scope for parents to shape the economic preferences and attitudes of their children through purposeful investments. We exploit information on the risk and trust attitudes of parents and their children, as well as rich information about parental efforts in...

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and social norms. The authors experimentally investigate the role of imitation and temporal decisional patterns when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. They identify two main...

In this paper I consider how individuals allocate their time between church attendance (and other religious activities) and secular leisure activities. Moreover individuals use a cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. I assume that the full benefit from...

This paper uses Propensity Score Matching to investigate the causal effect of breastfeeding on children's cognitive development. There is a strong association between breastfeeding and cognitive outcomes; however, it is notoriously difficult to establish whether this is causal, or whether it...

This paper examines gender peer effects on students' academic and noncognitive outcomes. We use a nationally representative survey of middle school students in China and focus on schools that randomly assign students to classrooms. Our findings show that having a higher proportion of female...