"We develop a Roy model of social interactions in which individuals sort into peer groups based on comparative advantage. Two key results emerge: First, when comparative advantage is the guiding principle of peer group organization, the effect of moving a student into an environment with...

Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City. The experiment recruited...

We implement a new approach for estimating the persuasive effects of political advertising. Our empirical strategy exploits FCC regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties. Applying this approach to uniquely...

Few theories in the social sciences have gained more widespread acceptance than Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - despite a lack of conclusive empirical evidence. At the core of Weber's theory lies a connection between Protestantism and attitudes toward work. Using...

We exploit the precise timing of natural disasters to provide empirical evidence on the connection between electoral accountability and politicians' support for special interests. We show that, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the evening news substantially reduce their coverage of...

Supreme Court justices often vote along ideological lines. Is this due to a genuinely different interpretation of the law, or does it reflect justices' desire to resolve politically charged legal questions in accordance with their personal views? To learn more about the nature of decision-making...

We study two dimensions of complexity that may interfere with individual choice. The first one is object complexity, which corresponds to the difficulty in evaluating any given alternative in a choice set. The second dimension is composition complexity, which increases when suboptimal...