Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual's peers have an impact on that individual's own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person's decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and antisocial behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also...

This paper explores individual and contextual factors related to the development of hopeful attitudes during adolescence using a nationally representative study. A key focus is on the experiences of maltreatment by adults, both for the adolescent and his/her classmates. While all types of...

We propose experiments in virtual reality (VR) as a new approach to examining behavior in an economic context, e.g., heterogeneity in dynamic tournaments. We simulate a realistic working situation in a highly immersive environment. Implementing a tournament in VR, we are able to mitigate the...

Using an identification strategy based on random assignment of refugees to different municipalities in Denmark between 1986 and 1998, we find strong evidence that gang crime rates in the neighbourhood at assignment increase the probability of boys to commit crimes before the age of 19, and that...

We study ingroup bias -- the preferential treatment of members of one's group -- in naturally occurring data, where economically significant allocation decisions are made under a strong non-discriminatory norm. Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000-2004, where the assignment of...

As regards to the abrupt growth of crime, it has been analyzed that, only with Becker's (1968) original findings, is not sufficient to prove this phenomena. Thus, many researches have incorporated new paradigms with the intention to explain the mechanisms which react to crime. New research lines...

While confounding factors typically jeopardize the possibility to use observational data to measure peer effects, field experiments offer the possibility to obtain clean evidence. In this paper we measure the output of four randomly selected groups of individuals who were asked to fill letters...

In an economic perspective, punitive damages and class actions can be viewed as sharing a common economic function – creating optimal deterrence. Building on Parisi and Cenini (2010), we study the effect of alternative procedural regimes on the effectiveness of punitive damages and class...

Using an identification strategy based on random assignment of refugees to different municipalities in Denmark between 1986 and 1998, we find strong evidence that gang crime rates in the neighbourhood at assignment increase the probability of boys to commit crimes before the age of 19, and that...