Recently, police departments, legislators, media, and the public at large in the U.S. have increasingly been concerned about racial disparities in officers' issuing traffic tickets. Ascertaining the extent to which an observed disparity reflects racial bias is the crucial issue. First, we use a...

We focus on a particular kind of discretionary behavior on the part of traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets – what we term speed discounting. It is anecdotally said that officers often give motorists a break by reporting a lower speed on their citation than the actual speed that they...

Accurate weather forecasts have substantial economic value. We examine the provision of accurate forecasts both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we use a simple Neo-Hotelling model. In that model, the public forecaster, the National Weather Service (NWS), tries to achieve...

The Cold War division of Korea, regarded as a natural experiment in institutional change, provides a unique opportunity to examine whether institutions affect social preferences. We recruited North Korean refugees and South Korean students to conduct laboratory experiments eliciting social...

Are workers in modern economies working too hard – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime...

Does single motherhood adversely affect infant health? This question is not easy to answer because of the endogeneity of coresidence during pregnancy. In this paper, we exploit quasi-natural variation in single motherhood from the moment of conception to that of birth arising from marriageable...

We examine college students' interaction within classrooms and estimate peer effects on their academic performance. We exploit a unique seating rule at a university in South Korea, known as the fixed-seat system. We propose a novel identification strategy based on students' repeated interaction....

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance – in favour of boys – across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain...

South Korea has boasted one of the world's most successful economies since the end of World War II. The South Korean labor market has recovered quickly from the depths of the Asian crisis in 1998, and has since remained surprisingly sound and stable. The unemployment rate has remained relatively...