I study the persuasive effects of slanted language, exploiting a ban on politically charged term “illegal immigrant” by Associated Press (AP) news wire. My empirical strategy combines timing with variation across media outlets in their baseline reliance AP copy. document sizable diffusion from copy to outlets. Moreover, individuals exposed through local show significantly lower support for rest...

We study the causes of sustained participation in political movements. To identify persistent effect protest participation, we randomly indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into an antiauthoritarian protest. role social networks, randomize this treatment’s intensity across major-cohort cells. find that incentives to attend one within a movement increase subsequent attendance but...

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or serve as a control group. League players faced variation contact, through random assignment homogeneous-caste mixed-caste teams, opponents. Collaborative contact increases cross-caste friendships efficiency trade, reduces own-caste f...

Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms, and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals’ behavior. Bundling agents’ political, organizational, attitudes with their prosocial conduct makes them care behaviors that they otherwise would not. The incorporation graph in score further promotes soft but ...

We analyze the incentives for showing off, which we model as a costly signaling game, and study consequences of norms against such behavior. Prior to competing in contest, newcomer can signal his talent an incumbent. In equilibrium, ability occurs only when is exceptionally talented. situations benefits both contestants: obvious reasons; incumbent by economizing on wasted effort contest. Our re...

This paper uses Propensity Score Matching to investigate the causal effect of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive development. There is a strong association between breastfeeding and cognitive outcomes; however, it is notoriously difficult to establish whether this is causal, or whether it arises because mothers who breastfeed tend to be those whose children would do better anyway. Using PSM,...

This paper presents an evolutionary model to explain the widespread diffusion of lifelong monogamous families. The essential condition, unique to humans, is the overlap of children of different ages. Under this condition, together with the salience of paternal investment and fatherhood uncertainty, monogamy attains a greater survivorship than serial monogamy and polygyny. This result is robust ...

We combine survey responses, network data, and medical records in order to examine how friends affect the decision to get vaccinated against influenza. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university generates exogenous variation in exposure to the vaccine, enabling us to credibly identify social effects. We find evidence of positive peer influences on...

Inequity aversion models have dominated the behavioral economics landscape in the last decade. This study uses variants of dictator and trust games to provide empirical content to these models. We manipulate market features—such as competition over resources—to demonstrate that extant models cannot explain realistic manipulations of either game. For example, we show that if socially acceptable ...