The opioid epidemic is a major public health problem that affects millions of people around the world. This paper addresses one challenge identified on the demand side of the epidemic: A large proportion of patients prescribed opioids lose track of their unused pills or save them for future use....

This paper examines how beliefs and preferences drive identity-conforming consumption or investments. We introduce a theory that explains how identity distorts individuals' beliefs about potential outcomes and imposes psychic costs on benefiting from identity-incongruent sources. We substantiate...

This paper examines how beliefs and preferences drive identity-conforming consumption or investments. We introduce a theory that explains how identity distorts individuals' beliefs about potential outcomes and imposes psychic costs on benefiting from identity-incongruent sources. We substantiate...

Research examining the effect of weak punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, which would enable agents to justify selfish behavior. We...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? Or does it have unintended consequences for U.S. security? To answer these questions, we estimate the effect of U.S. military aid on anti-American terrorism for a sample of 174 countries between 1968 and 2018. We find that higher levels of aid...

Descriptive norms – the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group – play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior. In this paper, we argue both theoretically...

This chapter discusses the role of military interventionism and aid in nation-building. We argue that (1) intervention strategies of foreign actors like the United States often unfavorably interact with local institutional settings, which (2) produces undesired outcomes not only for the target...