The goal of this paper is to link attitude toward risk over personal consumption with attitude toward risk over social consumptions. Because many everyday choices involve risk, these attitudes enter virtually every realm of individual decision-making. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for deducing preferences over risky social choices (which have consequences both for the Decision Maker and for others) from risky personal choices (which have consequences only for the Decision Maker) and riskless social choices, and we offer an experimental test of the theory. The experiments generate a rich dataset that enables completely non-parametric revealed preference tests of the theory at the level of the individual subject. Many subjects behave as predicted by the theory but a substantial fraction do not.

There are striking differences in inequality and redistribution between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there are corresponding differences in social preferences, we conducted a large-scale international social preference experiment where Americans and Norwegians make distributive choices in identical environments. Combining the infrastructure of an international online labor market and that of a leading international data collection agency, we show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. We also provide causal evidence suggesting that fairness considerations are more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations.

We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on the social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program, or a control group. We returned to the children when they reached 6-8 years of age and conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit their social preferences. We find that early childhood education has a strong causal impact on social preferences. Our findings highlight the importance of taking a broad perspective when designing and evaluating early childhood educational programs.

In a randomized controlled trial, we test whether removal of a barrier to exercise can improve academic performance.We find strong support for this hypothesis: university students who were provided with a free gym card exercised more and had a significant improvement in academic performance.The treated students were both less likely to drop out of classes and to fail at the exam.We provide evidence showing that exercise caused a healthier lifestyle and increased perceived self-control, which ultimately improved academic performance.The study demonstrates that removing barriers to physical activity can be an important tool for improving educational achievements.