This paper replicates results that some people, when allocating income, are “groupy” and discriminate between in and out groups, but many show no such bias. The paper explores psychometric, demographic, and political correlates. In an M-Turk experiment, no “Big Five” personality trait relates to this individual difference. Gender, education, and political party are not predictive. Political independents, however, are more likely to be non-groupy, and participants in deindustrialized counties or Deep South Republicans are more likely to be groupy. The results indicate (i) psychological notions of personality do not capture this heterogeneity and (ii) groupiness might relate to political and social contestation.

We construct the first long-term comparison of cross-sectional and panel estimates of immigrant earnings assimilation in the United States from a single data source. Unlike previous results, we find that selective out-migration of higher-earning immigrants biases downward cross-sectional estimates for all education groups. Cross-sectional estimates dramatically understate earnings growth for high-skilled foreign-born workers. The bias stems from both selective out-migration and selective employment; among high-skilled immigrants, low earners find employment with a substantial delay, while high earners work immediately on arrival. We present suggestive evidence that the H-1B visa program may play a role in estimated immigrant earnings dynamics.

How does school quality affect health amid multiple behavioral responses? The Rosenwald schools transformed school quality for rural southern African Americans in the early 1900s. Research shows that the schools made black migration northward more likely and that the Great Migration shortened life expectancy for these migrants. Besides the hypothesized health-enhancing effects of school quality, negative health effects might also occur through migration. We disentangle behavioral mechanisms and find complete exposure to the Rosenwald schools increased life expectancy by 2–3 months; a more naive approach finds no relationship. Results are robust to heterogeneous treatment effects and various measurement issues.

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are “rational cheaters,” who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate the “rational cheater model” by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism. A significant fraction of employees behave as the “rational cheater model” predicts. A substantial proportion of employees, however, do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer.