We design a decision-making scenario experiment on Facebook to measure subjects’ altruism and trust toward attendees of a religious service, a fitness class and a local music performance. Secular and religious subjects alike display significantly more altruism and trust toward the synagogue...

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages if and only if there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of them- selves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job open- ings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of...

Conditioning a monetary benefit on individuals’ family status can create distortions, even in individuals’ seemingly personal decisions, such as the birth of a child. Birth timing and its response to various policies has been studied by economists in several papers. However, pregnancy timing...

We identify a declining trend in the intergenerational mobility of men’s family income in the United States for sons aged 36-45 between 1997 and 2011, corresponding to fifteen successive rolling ten-year cohort-groups born between 1952 and 1975. Using PSID data to 2008, we first predict...

Under standard assumptions about players'cost functions, we show that a Tullock contest with asymmetric information has a pure strategy equilibrium. Next we study Tullock contests in which players have a common value and a common state-independent linear cost function. A two-player contest in...

Kingston (1976) and Anderson (1977) show that the probability that a given contestant wins a best-of-2k+1 series of asymmetric, zero-sum, binary-outcome games is, for a large class of assignment rules, independent of which contestant is assigned the advantageous role in each component game. We...

Usury laws cap the interest rates that lenders can charge. Using data from Prosper.com (an online lending marketplace), I show how interest rate caps affect: 1) the probability that a loan is funded; 2) the amount a borrower requests; 3) the interest rate at which a loan is funded; and 4) loan...

In this paper, employing the political agency framework, we revisit the comparison between autocracy and democracy with respect to their effect on growth outcomes. We find that ability to replace an incumbent political leader through election is no guarantee in itself for the welfare superiority...

We analyze price patterns at franchised and corporate-owned McDonald's outlets in 1999 and 2006 and find that prices at franchised outlets were higher than those at corporate outlets. The price difference between franchised and corporate outlets decreased between 1999 and 2006 but only for items...