Tenure security and subsistence needs influence the choice between unexploited topsoil and investment in children's human capital as the mode of transfer of wealth. We develop an overlapping generations model of a representative rural household to inform this choice. Using a unique...

We study the role of fairness concerns in the demand for redistribution through workfare. In the first part of the paper, we present new evidence from a survey experiment. We show that individuals are more generous towards poor people whom they perceive to be diligent workers relative to poor...

The recent surge of social enterprises has focused governments', academics' and practitioners' attention on alternate organisational structures and mechanisms that benefit the disadvantaged. However, very little economic theory has been applied to these new organisational forms to determine...

Shareholders with standard monetary preferences will give a manager incentives to increase firm profits, which can be achieved with equity grants. When shareholders are socially responsible, in the sense that they also value corporate social performance, it is not clear which incentives the...

We develop a theoretical model to identify and compare partial and equilibrium effects of uncertainty and the magnitude of fines on punishment and deterrence. Partial effects are effects on potential violators' and punishers' decisions when the other side's behavior is exogenously given....

How does organizational higher purpose affect employee behavior and firm output? We develop an optimal-contracting model which shows that pursuing organizational higher purpose dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs and elicits higher employee effort. The effect on profits, however,...

We conducted a field experiment in a typical Chinese prison to examine the in-group bias of groups with a stigmatized identity. Inmates were given the opportunity to work for a charity. We found evidence of both pro-sociality and in-group favoritism among inmates. In particular, inmates...

Many believe that consumer-sourced reputational information about products would increasingly replace top-down regulation. Instead of protecting consumers through coercive laws, reputational information gleaned from the wisdom of the crowd would guide consumer decision making. There is now a...

This paper tests whether intergenerational transfers are given out of altruism or part of an exchange. We uniquely draw a distinction between the transfer motives in a semiparametric, two-part model. Compared to models employed by extant studies, this approach makes less parametric assumption,...

We investigate the role of endowment heterogeneity in a local and global public goods setting with multiple group membership and examine the effect of temporal role reversal on cooperation decisions. Subjects can contribute to a global public good which benefits all subjects and two local public...