Providing information about contributions to public goods is known to generate further contributions. However, it is often impossible to provide verifiable information on contributions. Through a large-scale field experiment and a series of laboratory experiments, I show that nonbinding announcements of support for a public good encourage others to contribute, even when actual contributions might not or cannot be made. Providing a way to easily announce support for a charity increases donations by $865 per workplace fundraising campaign (or 16 percent of average giving). I discuss implications for understanding prosocial behavior and for organizations aiming to increase contributions to public goods.

We run a series of experiments involving over 4,000 online participants and over 10,000 school-aged youth. When individuals are asked to subjectively describe their performance on a male-typed task relating to math and science, we find a large gender gap in self-evaluations. This gap arises when self-evaluations are provided to potential employers, and thus measure self-promotion, and when self-evaluations are not driven by incentives to promote. The gender gap in self-evaluations proves to be persistent and arises as early as the sixth grade. No gender gap arises if individuals are asked about their performance on a more female-typed task.

Programs to encourage labor market activity among youth, including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, can be supported by three broad rationales. They may (i) provide contemporaneous income support to participants; (ii) encourage work experience that improves future employment and/or educational outcomes of participants; and/or (iii) keep participants “out of trouble.” We study randomized lotteries for access to the New York City (NYC) Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest summer youth employment program in the United States, by merging SYEP administrative data on 294,100 lottery participants to IRS data on the universe of U.S. tax records; to New York State administrative incarceration data; and to NYC administrative cause of death data. In assessing the three rationales, we find that (i) SYEP participation causes average earnings and the probability of employment to increase in the year of program participation, with modest contemporaneous crowdout of other earnings and employment; (ii) SYEP participation causes a modest decrease in average earnings for three years following the program and has no impact on college enrollment; and (iii) SYEP participation decreases the probability of incarceration and decreases the probability of mortality, which has important and potentially pivotal implications for analyzing the net benefits of the program.

We document a new way that discrimination operates: through sequential spillover effects. Employers in an incentivized resume rating experiment evaluate a sequence of hypothetical candidates with randomly assigned characteristics. Candidates are rated worse when following white men than when following women or minorities. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that spillover effects are inversely related to direct bias. When reviewing high-quality resumes or recruiting in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industries, employers directly favor white men and display no spillover effect. For low-quality resumes or non-STEM industries, we find no direct bias but a strong spillover effect. Results suggest that discrimination arises in subtle ways.

Myriad environments allow for the possibility of confusion. Agents may appeal to such confusion—or the possibility of making an honest mistake—to justify their behavior. In three sets of experiments involving thousands of subjects, we document evidence of such motivated errors. We document this evidence in a simple environment in which the scope for errors is small and in more complex environments in which subjects display correlation neglect and an anchoring bias.

Organs for transplantation are a scarce resource. Paying to increase the supply of organs is illegal in much of the world. We review efforts to increase transplantation by increasing the supply of available organs from living and deceased donors. Progress has been made in increasing the availability of living donor kidneys through kidney exchange. Recent legislation in Israel aims at encouraging deceased donation by awarding priority for receiving organs to registered donors. We also explore the manner in which organ donation is solicited and present evidence to suggest that some recent movement towards 'mandated choice' may be counterproductive.

Organ donations from deceased donors provide the majority of transplanted organs in the United States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the relative ease of becoming one. We study in the laboratory an experimental game modeled on the decision to register as an organ donor and investigate how changes in the management of organ waiting lists might impact donations. We find that an organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors has a significant positive impact on registration.

We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called incentivized resume rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood that candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.

Can access to a few hundred dollars of liquidity affect the career choice of a recent college graduate? In a three-year field experiment with Teach For America (TFA), a prestigious teacher placement program, we randomly increase the financial packages offered to nearly 7,300 potential teachers who requested support for the transition into teaching. The first two years of the experiment reveal that although most applicants do not respond to a marginal $600 of grants or loans, those in the worst financial position respond by joining TFA at higher rates. We continue the experiment into the third year and self-replicate our results. For the highest-need applicants, an extra $600 in loans, $600 in grants, and $1,200 in grants increase the likelihood of joining TFA by 12.2, 11.4, and 17.1 percentage points (or 20.0%, 18.7%, and 28.1%), respectively. Additional grant and loan dollars are equally effective, suggesting a liquidity mechanism. A follow-up survey bolsters the liquidity story and also shows that those drawn into teaching would have otherwise worked in private-sector firms.

This paper develops and deploys a methodology for testing whether people correctly value tools that reduce attention costs. We call these tools bandwidth enhancements (BEs) and characterize how demand for BEs varies with the pecuniary incentives to be attentive, under the null hypothesis of correct perceptions and optimal choice. We examine if the theoretical optimality conditions are satisfied in three experiments. The first is a field experiment ( n = 1373) with an online education platform, in which we randomize incentives to complete course modules and incentives to utilize a plan‐making tool to complete the modules. In the second experiment ( n = 2306), participants must complete a survey in the future. We randomize survey‐completion incentives and how long participants must wait to complete the survey, and we elicit willingness to pay for reminders. The third experiment ( n = 1465) involves a psychometric task in which participants must identify whether there are more correct or incorrect mathematical equations in an image. We vary incentives for accuracy, elicit willingness to pay to reduce task difficulty, and examine the impact of learning and feedback. In all experiments, demand for reducing attention costs increases as incentives for accurate task completion increase. However, in all experiments—and across all conditions—our tests imply that this increase in demand is too small relative to the null of correct perceptions. These results suggest that people may be uncertain or systematically biased about their attention cost functions, and that experience and feedback do not necessarily eliminate bias.