Reducing criminal acts in society is a crucial duty of governments. Establishing punishment structures to attain this goal involves high costs. Typically, both theorists and practitioners resort to the adjustment of severity and/or certainty of punishment as effective deterrents of criminal...

We investigate the effect of U.S. military aid and U.S. troop deployments on anti-American terrorism, using a sample of 106 countries between 1986 and 2011. We find that greater military commitment leads to more anti-American terrorism. We study the underlying mechanisms using a mediation...

Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of severity and certainty of punishment. This paper presents the first controlled experiment to study a third important factor that has been mainly overlooked: the swiftness of formal sanctions. We...

We study how individuals' compliance with norms of pro-social behavior is influenced by other actors' compliance in a novel, dynamic, and non-strategic experimental setting. We are particularly interested in the role that social proximity among peers plays in eroding or upholding norm...

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...

Political polarization has ruptured the fabric of U.S. society. I quantify this phenomenon through the use of 5 pre-registered studies, comprising 15 behavioral experiments and a diverse set of over 8,600 participants. The focus of this paper is to examine various behavioral-, belief-, and...

In multiple pre-registered experiments, we examine the effect of sequences of positive and negative experiences on altruism, trust, trustworthiness, and cooperation. For non-social experiences, we find no effect on subsequent behavior in any of these social domains. However, when experiences are...