Information provision experiments allow researchers to test economic theories and answer policy-relevant questions by varying the information set available respondents. We survey emerging literature using in economics discuss applications macroeconomics, finance, political economy, public economics, labor health economics. also design considerations provide best-practice recommendations on how ...

Most individual life insurance policies lapse, with lapsers cross-subsidizing non-lapsers. We show that and lapse patterns predicted by standard rational expectations models are the opposite of those observed empirically. propose two behavioral consistent evidence: (i) consumers forget to pay premiums (ii) understate future liquidity needs. conduct surveys a large insurer. New buyers believe th...

We conduct lab experiments to investigate demand for consumption agency in married couples from Pakistan. Most subjects are no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, suggesting that individual executive has instrumental value. find significant evidence all experiments, varying with the cost and anticipated benefit agency. But often make choices incompatible pure...

We investigate how the salience of an ethnic minority affects majority group’s voting behavior. use increased Muslim communities during Ramadan as a natural experiment. Exploiting exogenous variation in distance election dates to over 1980–2013 period Germany, our findings reveal polarization. Vote shares for both right- and left-wing extremist parties increase municipalities with mosques when ...

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...

A (partially naïve) quasi-hyperbolic discounter repeatedly chooses whether to complete a task. Her net benefits of task completion are drawn independently between periods from time-invariant distribution. We show that the probability completing conditional on not having done so earlier increases towards deadline. Conversely, we establish nonidentifiability by proving for any time-preference par...

We document a decline in the frequency of shopping trips United States since 1980 and consider its implications for measurement consumption inequality. A as households stock up on storable goods (i.e., inventory behavior) will lead to rise expenditure inequality when latter is measured at high frequency, even underlying unchanged. find that most recently documented 1980s can be accounted by thi...

Elicitation mechanisms typically presume only money enters utility functions. However, nonmonetary objectives are confounders. In particular, psychologists argue people favor bets where ability is involved over equivalent random bets—a preference for control. Our new elicitation method mitigates control and determines that under the widely used matching probabilities method, subjects report bel...

We study how declared wealth responds to changes in tax rates. Exploiting rich intranational variation Switzerland, we find a 1 percentage point drop canton’s rate raises reported taxable by at least 43 percent after 6 years. Administrative records of two cantons with quasi-randomly assigned differential reforms suggest that 24 the effect arises from taxpayer mobility and 21 concurrent rise hou...

This paper considers a two period consumption-saving model in which future income is uncertain. If the future income is also ambiguous, in the sense of having multiple priors, then ambiguity attitudes also a¤ect the saving decision. Unlike one-period decision problems, ambiguity attitude does more than just distort the probabilities of the various priors. It also distorts the relative importanc...