An online experiment reveals that the desire to engage in voluntary giving decreases significantly with group size, while voting for group-wide redistribution is precisely estimated to not depend on group size; moreover, people’s perception of the size of their reference group is malleable and affects their desire to give.

Current proposals to expand the Child Tax Credit would reduce employment by 1.5 million people and, as a result, reduce child poverty by only 22%—more than a third lower than estimates that fail to account for employment reductions—and fail to reduce deep child poverty at all.

Misperceptions about others are widespread, asymmetric, much larger when about out-group members, and positively associated with one’s own attitudes; also, experimental treatments to re-calibrate misperceptions generally work as intended.

This new research finds that race and gender discrimination varies dramatically across large employers in the United States and, importantly, such discrimination among employers is detectable.

The material circumstances of single mothers improved in the decades following welfare reform, with the consumption of the most disadvantaged single mother headed families—those with low consumption or low education—rising noticeably over time and at a faster rate than those in comparison groups.

This work challenges existing ideas about the effects of demographic trends and argues that demographics in the future will continue to lead to falling rates of return and rising wealth-to-GDP ratios.

Counterintuitively, this new research finds that increased competition among lenders may decrease, rather than increase, consumer welfare in subprime credit markets by leading to higher-than-otherwise interest rates.

A 1947 worker-protection law that applies only to large firms has long stopped large Indian firms from growing. Since the early 2000s, large Indian firms have grown by relying on contract workers; such workers now account for almost 40% of the labor force of large Indian firms. The use of contract workers have also spurred increases in productivity and job creation among large Indian firms.