The stability of many post-conflict societies rests on the successful reintegration of former soldiers. We examine social capital of former soldiers in Northern Uganda, where the Lord's Resistance Army forcibly recruited tens of thousands of youth during a recent brutal conflict. We use a set of...

Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after WWII and construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces providing regional and temporal variation. We correlate hunger exposure...

Conceptual priming has become an increasingly popular tool in economics. Here, we review the literature that uses priming in incentivized experiments to study economic questions. We mainly focus on the role of social identity, culture, and norms in shaping preferences and behavior. We also...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters’ preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates’ policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

This study examines the effect of smallholder farmers’ access to a formal climate risk transfer mechanism on their risk preferences. Survey and experimental data were collected from smallholder farmers that have access to weather index-based crop insurance (WICI) in Ethiopia. We use an...

Avoiding unmanageable climate change implies that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced rapidly. A significant body of literature shows that policy instruments such as carbon prices can make an important contribution to this goal. In contrast, changes in preferences or values are...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modelling preferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shape preferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept of preferences furthers our understanding of how they...

Economic change, while creating innovation and growth, at the same time generates gales of creative destruction. It is still largely unclear what this concept implies for the task of assessing welfare (and, correspondingly, the need for and scope of policy-making) in a novelty-generating,...