Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard is, however, often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people's merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...

We document economists' opinions about what is worth knowing and ask (i) which research objectives economic research should embrace and (ii) which topics it should study. Almost 10,000 economic researchers from all fields and ranks of the profession participated in our global survey. Detailed...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...

We document economists' opinions about what is worth knowing and ask (i) which research objectives economic research should embrace and (ii) which topics it should study. Almost 10,000 economic researchers from all fields and ranks of the profession participated in our global survey. Detailed...

We study people's subjective models of the macroeconomy and shed light on their at-tentional foundations. To do so, we measure beliefs about the effects of macroeconomic shocks on unemployment and inflation, providing respondents with identical information about the parameters of the shocks and...

Viele Menschen tun wenig für den Klimaschutz, weil sie die Bereitschaft anderer unterschätzen, ebenfalls ihren Beitrag zu leisten. Das ist das zentrale Ergebnis eines umfangreichen Befragungsexperiments in den USA.

Based on a global survey of almost 10,000 academic economists, Peter Andre and Armin Falk explore what economists perceive to be worthwhile research in their discipline. Finding many economists think that economic research should become more policy relevant, multidisciplinary, and disruptive,...

We provide evidence on narratives about the macroeconomy—the stories people tell to explain macroeconomic phenomena—in the context of a historic surge in inflation. We measure economic narratives in open-ended survey responses and represent them as Directed Acyclic Graphs. We apply this...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...