A standard test for adverse selection in health insurance examines whether people with characteristics predicting high health care utilization are more likely to buy insurance (or buy more generous nsurance). George Akerlof’s theory of adverse selection suggests a test based on prices:...

Why do men have more lenient ethical standards than women? To address this question, we test the male pragmatism hypothesis, which posits that men rely on their social and achievement motivations to set ethical standards more so than women. Across two studies, motivation was both manipulated and...

Sociologists have long been interested in how interactions among the diverse groups that constitute modern societies shape group mobilization efforts, including the use of group media. We advance research on this topic by analyzing the growth of magazines affiliated with religious groups in...

This paper presents the first study of the economic effects of a citywide minimum wage— San Francisco’s adoption of a minimum wage, set at $8.50 in 2004 and $9.14 by 2007. Compared to earlier benchmark studies by Card and Krueger and by Neumark and Wascher, this study surveys...

This article explores how to build political support for law reform designed to achieve economic redistribution. Specifically, I analyze and compare reforms that aim to redistribute by targeting benefits at low-income individuals through an income or means test, versus those that emphasize...

We use census data to examine the impact of industrialization on children’s education in Mexico. We find no evidence of reverse causality in this case. We find small positive effects of industrialization on primary education, effects which are larger for domestic manufacturing than for...

Women select into top business degree programs at a lower rate than men and are underrepresented in high-ranking positions in business organizations. We examined taboo trade-off aversion as one possible explanation for these patterns. In Study 1, we found that women implicitly associated...

Using data from a large U.S. retail firm, we examine how differences in race, age, and gender between a manager and a subordinate affect the subordinate’s rate of quits, dismissals, and promotions. We find that these demographic differences can have statistically significant and sometimes...

We study how employing organizations divide up the tasks they do, and therefore how they structure their employees’ jobs. Much research in the past three decades has shown that employing organizations’ job structures determine the social, economic, and psychological outcomes...

We use the introduction of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to assess whether the job mobility and wages of near-poor parents are suppressed through job lock. We exploit differential take up rates among eligible households and stratify adults in these household in to...