The content of this dissertation focuses on the link between earnings risk and the preferences of workers in the labor market. The research papers which comprise the chapters of the dissertation all examine worker responses to short-run earnings variation. Chapter 1 addresses the question of whether or not behavior consistent with having risk preferences around a daily income target can explain observed behavior in taxi drivers. Chapter 2 examines hows the outcomes of a wage distribution can influence job satisfaction. Lastly, chapter 3 utilizes an experiment to establish a link between estimated risk attitudes and labor supply outcomes.

This dissertation examines decisions and belief formation in a variety of experimental settings. Chapter 1 examines how individuals form self-serving beliefs to justify selfish actions against others. The second chapter investigates how social and self-image can affect an individual’s decision to be charitable. The third chapter uses the mobile application Prometheus to conduct a field-style experiment to study how individuals search for information, process information and ultimately make a decision using various types of information.

This dissertation studies a notion called access-based beliefs, the idea that access to an alternative has a direct impact on beliefs of its value. As an example, individual's may lower their beliefs of alternatives to which they have low access, a phenomenon colloquially known as sour grapes. Using multiple settings in the lab and field, I demonstrate existence of access-based beliefs consistent with the sour grapes hypothesis and provide evidence for how it may be prevalent in real-world settings with an emphasis on the poor. In chapter 1, in an environment where learning channels are controlled for, I provide a proof-of-concept of access-based beliefs, showing that lower access to a subjective lottery reduces revealed beliefs of its value. In chapter 2, I study access-based beliefs in a real-world setting. I show that lowering access to a real-world investment (an SAT prep package) lowers beliefs of its expected effectiveness and reduces investment in it amongst a subsample of the population that would be expected to have the highest demand for it. In chapter 3, I explore the notion of relative access, that is, the value of an alternative is a function of whether or not others possess it. I find that a small but significant portion of individuals display a preference for conformity or non-conformity in consumption based on the societal distribution.

Chapter 1 considers a theoretical model of evidence acquisition and disclosure in a legal setting. It analyzes how risk aversion affects an agent’s willingness to seek out information and studies how legal rules can be used to balance the gains from evidence gathering with the costs of acquisition. Chapter 2 examines if different expectations about men and women’s behavior, or stereotypes, could be responsible for observed gender differences, even in anonymous laboratory settings, and shows experimental evidence consistent with this model’s predictions. Chapter 3 experimentally examines players’ recall of past play in a canonical economic game.

The dissertation contains three essays exploring race and political economy. Leveraging large, novel datasets and applied econometric techniques, it explores the role that government policy may have on racial disparities in civic engagement and education. Chapter 1 examines the impact of federal election oversight restrictions established under the Voting Rights Act on electoral participation and outcomes. I find that these oversight measures led to large long-run gains in minority turnout, but actually decreased Democratic vote share in presidential elections. I provide evidence that this partisan shift was due to political backlash among racially-conservative whites. Chapter 2 investigates how acts of police violence affect the educational and psychological outcomes of Los Angeles public high school students. I find that students living near an officer-involved killing experience large and significant decreases in academic achievement and increases in emotional disturbance. These effects are concentrated among black and Hispanic students and police killings of other minorities, particularly those in which the individual killed was unarmed. Chapter 3 then explores how police violence influences voter turnout. I find that police killings lead to increased civic engagement among black communities, especially those that were historically critical of the criminal justice system.

This dissertation examines when and why individuals behave prosocially and antisocially in economic environments. The first chapter uses a natural experiment to investigate how people respond simultaneously to two prosocial norms--restaurant tipping and generosity during the holiday season. The second chapter examines the interplay between strong social norms and their fragility by employing a laboratory experiment to see whether strong social norms for honest conduct cause victims of dishonesty to pay forward dishonesty to third parties. Finally, the third chapter investigates the role of shame in honest reporting by asking whether individuals are more truthful when they know their statements will be subject to ex-post disclosure. Taken together, we gain insights into the motives for altruistic and ethical behavior as well as the roles social norms play in promoting or deterring such behavior. This research both draws from and extends to existing research in psychology and organizational behavior as well as economics.

In Chapter 1, I investigate a novel channel of polarization: divergent interpretations of information. I conduct an online experiment with Democrats and Republicans in the US to study beliefs about racial discrimination in the labor market, a topic on which Democrats and Republicans are polarized. I find that Democrats' beliefs about racial labor market discrimination are responsive to information on racial wage disparities, while Republicans' beliefs are not. As a result, wage gap information fails to reduce (and even increases) the partisan difference in discrimination beliefs. Moreover, even after both groups agree about the extent of racial hiring discrimination, participants change their opinions about whether it is a problem depending on their political affiliation, enabling disagreement in policy demand. Together, these findings highlight key challenges in using information to reduce polarization.

In Chapter 2, we leverage a randomized evaluation of an early childhood program to study the impact of early life investments on resilience to negative shocks. When the children in our study were 3-5 years old, they were randomized to a preschool program, a parenting program or to a control group. Ten years later, the children were exposed to school shut-downs during the Covid-19 pandemic. With nearly 900 observations, we show that the parenting program had a protective causal impact on the decrease in academic test scores during the year that schools were closed. While the control group saw a 0.31 SD decline in standardized test scores after Covid-19, the parenting group saw only a 0.12 SD decline. We provide a conceptual framework and evidence on potential mechanisms driving this effect.

In Chapter 3, we explore the robustness of rank independence of equalizing reductions with respect to experimental procedures. Bernheim and Sprenger (2020) devise and implement a novel test of rank-dependent probability weighting both in general and as formulated in cumulative prospect theory (CPT). They reject both hypotheses decisively. CPT cannot simultaneously account for the rank independence of "equalizing reductions" for three-outcome lotteries, which it construes as indicating linear probability weighting, and the relationship between equalizing reductions and probabilities, which it interprets as indicating highly nonlinear probability weighting.