We report results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the pattern and level of charitable contributions of donors. The study includes an experimental measure of charitable giving and targets three charities: the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and Oxfam...

Threshold common pool resource dilemmas, such as fisheries or groundwater reserves, are important topic for policy-makers. Uncertainty about the threshold for sustainable use or number of resource users may exacerbate the overconsumption problem. We are first to investigate the joint impact of...

For a variety of public goods projects, the exact return from provision is not known. We design an experiment to test the impact of an uncertain return on voluntary contributions. An uncertain return may be caused by either nature (the benefits of building a dyke depend on the frequency and...

Previous literature suggests positive relationships between social capital, pro-social behavior and subsequent economic development. We analyze the relationship between social networks and trust (two measures of social capital) and self-reported charitable contributions of time and/or money...

We conduct a field experiment with low-income subjects in Dallas, Texas. We examine voluntary, informal risk sharing using a visual representation of the solidarity game developed for low-literacy populations. We find substantially more ‘fixed gift to loser' behavior and less ‘egotistical'...

Behavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous, suggesting that the composition of social preference types within a group may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. We conduct agent-based...

We present lab experiments that utilize a new three-player game designed to capture key features of care provision. We discuss results from the baseline game and test two sets of treatments designed to gauge the impact of potential policy interventions. The first varies the budget subsidy...

We conduct a framed field experiment in two Dallas neighborhoods to examine how common identity affects individual contributions to local public goods. The participants' common identity is primed to make neighborhood membership salient before individuals make donations to local non-profit...

We conduct a study of altruistic behavior among high school students using the dictator game. We find a much stronger norm of equal splitting than previously observed in the typical university student population, with almost 45% of high school subjects choosing an equal split of the endowment....

Using a field experiment eliciting the risk preferences of 490 9th and 11th grade students from a variety of school environments, we examine various factors influencing the development of these risk preferences. In addition to factors previously considered by economists (gender, ethnicity,...