Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. This paper tests this hypothesis experimentally, using a sample of managers and employees from a...

Uncertain information is frequently confirmed or retracted after people have initially heard it. A large existing literature has studied how people change their beliefs in response to new information, however, how people react to information about previous information is still unclear. We...

The paper studies whether a drought in 1788 affected the outbreak of peasant revolts during the French Revolution. I construct a community-level data set with information on local drought severity and peasant uprisings in 1789. Results indicate that those more affected by the drought more often...

Procrastination is often attributed to time-inconsistent preferences but may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding optimistic beliefs about their future effort costs. This study provides a rigorous empirical test for this notion of ‘motivated procrastination’....

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of selfreports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

This paper sets up a dynamic general equilibrium model to study how the composition of technical progress affects the asymptotic speed of convergence. The following questions are addressed: Will endogenizing a fraction of the productivity increases as coming from learning by investing help to...

Ambiguity and learning about the equity premium can simultaneously explain the low fraction of financial wealth allocated to stocks over the life cycle and the stock market participation puzzle. Individuals are ambiguous about the size of the equity premium and are averse to this ambiguity,...

Many government policies affect incentives to acquire human capital. Two workhorse models dominate the literature analyzing these policies: Learning by Doing (LBD) and Ben-Porath (BP). This paper makes two novel findings related to these models. First, LBD and BP generate different predictions...

We show that in the formalization of representativeness (Kahneman and Tversky (1972)) developed by Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010), overreaction and confidence are affected by uncertainty, as a news effect interacts with an uncertainty effect. In the time series domain, this interaction emerges in...

We hypothesize that broad contact, involving brief interactions with multiple outgroup members, and deep contact, meaning longer interactions with a single outgroup member, play distinct roles in shaping intergroup relations. We set up a factory in India and recruited Hindu and Muslim men to...