The emergence of competition is a defining aspect of human nature and characterizes many important social environments. However, its relationship with how social groups are formed has received little attention. We design an experiment to analyze how individuals’ willingness to compete is...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. In this paper a condition on the primitives determines whether an economy supports institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not...

This paper studies how discriminatory fake news arises and spatially diffuses. We focus on India at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: on March 30, a Muslim convention (the Tablighi Jamaat) in New Delhi became publicly recognized as a COVID hotspot, and the next day, fake news on Muslims...

This paper studies whether and how religious leaders affect politics. Focusing on Italian dioceses in the period from 1948 to 1992, we find that the identity of the bishop in office explains a significant amount of the variation in the vote share for the Christian Democracy party (DC). This...

This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have hidden costs, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden costs for...

The emergence of competition is a defining aspect of human nature and characterizes many important social environments. However, its relationship with how social groups are formed has received little attention. We design an experiment to analyze how individuals' willingness to compete is...