This paper evaluates an intervention in India that engaged adolescent girls and boys classroom discussions about gender equality for two years, aiming to reduce their support societal norms restrict women's girls' opportunities. Using a randomized controlled trial, we find the program made attitudes more supportive of by 0.18 standard deviations, or, equivalently, converted 16 percent regressiv...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game that we call Solomon’s Game. The main feature of this game is that players can not only punish unfair people but also help those individuals who are the victims of that unfairness. The aim of this experiment is to compare the human tendency to punish unfair behavior to the desire to help victims of that unfairness, in presence of a bu...

This paper proposes a geometric delineation of distributional preference types and a non-parametric approach for their identification in a two-person context. It starts with a small set of assumptions on preferences and shows that this set (i) naturally results in a taxonomy of distributional archetypes that nests all empirically relevant types considered in previous work in economics and socia...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third class. British passengers were more likely to perish than members of other nations. This extreme event rep...

We study if and how social preferences extend to risky environments. We provide experimental evidence from different versions of dictator games with risky outcomes, and establish that preferences that are exclusively based on ex post or on ex ante comparisons cannot generate the observed behavioral patterns. The more money decision-makers transfer in the standard dictator game, the more likely ...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on crosssection data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory wealth inequality due to age, yet preserves inequality arising from other factors. This new method is supe...

The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design closely depends on the assumed bequest motives. Alternative bequest motives are thus analyzed either in isolation or co...

Empirical evidence suggests that parents who have themselves inherited from their own parents are more likely to leave an estate to their children even after controlling for income, wealth and education. This implies an indirect reciprocal behavior between three generations by transmitting the attitude towards bequeathing from one generation to the next. We incorporate such an intergenerational...