Girls typically have higher grades than boys in school and recent research suggests that part of this gender difference may be due to discrimination of boys. We rigorously test this in a field experiment where a random sample of the same tests in the Swedish language is subject to blind and...

Individuals differ in how they construct their investment portfolios, yet empirical models of portfolio risk typically account only for a small portion of the cross-sectional variance. This paper asks whether genetic variation can explain some of these individual differences. Following a major...

Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. In particular, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. In experimental work, several authors have identified a positive correlation between such second-order...

We rigorously test for ethnic discrimination in high school grading in Sweden. A random sample of the national tests in the Swedish language is graded both non-blind by the student’s own teacher and blind without any identifying information. The increase in the test score due to non-blind...

In an otherwise neutrally described Prisonersʼ dilemma experiment, we document that behavior is more likely to be cooperative when the game is called the Community Game than when it is called the Stock Market Game. However, the difference vanishes when only one of the subjects is in control of...

Twins-based estimates of the return to schooling have featured prominently in the economics of education literature. Their unbiasedness hinges critically on the assumption that within-pair variation in schooling is explained by factors unrelated to wage earning ability. This paper develops a...

We develop a simple model of generous behavior. It is based on the premise that some people are generous, but everyone wants to appear generous—especially in the eyes of other generous people. Although non-monetary donations are always inefficient, they frequently occur in equilibrium because...

This article reviews existing research at the intersection of genetics and economics, presents some new findings that illustrate the state of genoeconomics research, and surveys the prospects of this emerging field. Twin studies suggest that economic outcomes and preferences, once corrected for...

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three...