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This paper examines how conservation decisions are affected by environmental degradation. Donations to an environmental NGO and participation in actual conservation activities capture individual preferences for environmental conservation. Environmental degradation is measured both through survey-based data on experiences of deforestation and environmental shocks, and through indices of deforestation constructed with GIS data. The results show that being exposed to environmental degradation is correlated both with higher donations and conservation behavior. The relationship between conservation choices and individual social preferences is also explored. Experimental measures of individual altruism and inequality aversion, and survey measures of trust, time preferences and civic engagement are correlated with donations and real world conservation decisions respectively. These findings show the role of environmental awareness in fostering environmental conservation even in very poor settings. They also highlight the potential of experiments, which closely mirror real world decisions, to generate conclusions generalizable to individual behavior outside the laboratory.

We study how to foster engagement in the energy sector, where signals about consumption are opaque and infrequent. We evaluate an energy company's large-scale communication campaign for promoting natural gas self-reading. Self-readings allow utilities to bill customers on the basis of real - as opposed to estimated - consumption. Exploiting variation in campaign messages, we test the impact of imposing a sense of urgency on customers through a deadline for submitting a meter reading. We find that messages that induce a sense of urgency are twice as effective than generic messages in encouraging self-readings, consistent with recent research on the urgency effect. The increased sense of urgency moves to action customers with both high and low levels of baseline engagement; the effect is stronger on the former.

We examine the causal effect of legal institutional quality on informal norms of cooperation and study the interaction of institutions and culture in sustaining economic exchange. A total of 346 subjects in Italy and Kosovo played a market game under different and randomly allocated institutional treatments, which generated different incentives to behave honestly, preceded and followed by a noncontractible and nonenforceable trust game. Significant increases in individual trust and trustworthiness followed exposure to better institutions. A 1- percentage-point reduction in the probability of facing a dishonest partner in the market game, which is induced by the quality of legal institutions, increases trust by 7–11 percent and trustworthiness by 13–19 percent. This suggests that moral norms of cooperative behavior can follow improvements in formal institutional quality. Cultural origin, initial trust, and trustworthiness influence opportunistic behavior in markets, but only in the absence of strong formal institutions.

The adoption of low carbon technologies needs to go hand in hand with an increased awareness of climate change and its consequences and solutions. Attitudes toward climate change are influenced by a variety of factors, most notably educational attainment and exposure to climatic events attributable to climate change. However, less is known about the effect of technology adoption on climate change beliefs and support for mitigating measures. Through a longitudinal, incentivized field experiment with Chinese households, we assess attitudes toward climate change before and after adopting efficient lighting technology. The results show differential patterns of attitudinal change: while belief in the reality of climate change and willingness to adopt energy-efficient appliances increase, support for energy taxes does not. We attribute the attitudinal change to the adoption of LED light bulbs. Further evidence suggests that experience with efficient technology, rather than knowledge acquisition, drives this change. These results highlight the importance of action-initiating behavioral intervention to complement educational programs aimed at improving knowledge.

Environmental self-identity is considered a promising lever to generate positive spillovers across pro-environmental behaviors: existing evidence shows that it is positively correlated with pro-environmental choices and that it can be easily manipulated, by reminding individuals of their past pro-environmental actions. However, it remains unclear whether it can be successfully used for environmental policy making. In two online, incentive-compatible experiments, we manipulate participants' environmental self-identity and test whether this leads to increased donations to an environmental charity. Additionally, we investigate the interaction between self-identity priming and two commonly used behavioral policy tools: social information (Study 1, N = 400) and goal commitment (Study 2, N = 495). Our results suggest caution in leveraging environmental self-identity to promote pro-environmental behaviors, provide indications on how to target policies based on self-identity primes, and offer novel evidence on the interaction between different behavioral policy tools.

We investigate norms of corruption using the norm-elicitation procedure introduced by Krupka and Weber (2013). We use a within-subject design whereby the norms are elicited from the same subjects who are observed making choices in a bribery game. We test whether the order in which the norm-elicitation task and the bribery game are conducted affects elicited norms and behavior. We find little evidence of order effects in our experiment. We discuss how these results compare with those reported in the existing literature.

Enterprises run by women in developing countries are largely home-based and belong to small business networks which may explain these businesses' small size, low profitability and short life. Using data from Pakistan, we confirm that the majority of female-owned micro-enterprises are home-based and find that these home businesses are likely to close within two years. Our incentivized tasks elicit household preferences for business location and advice taking from women and male decision-makers. Both men and women are willing to sacrifice almost 60% of median profits for running businesses from home. Women avoid taking outside advice, even when it increases task earnings. Women's preferences are correlated with business experience, but not with agency within the household,mobility and household responsibilities.

We investigate altruism among household members in the presence of information asymmetry using artefactual experiments in Pakistan. Having a family member who does not respect one's control over earned property makes generosity less likely within the experiment. Women, who display greater entitlement over own earnings, are less generous when they can conceal their allocation decisions, showing that self-regarding behaviors are driven by pent-up demand for household members to respect their control over resources. Our findings reveal that understanding household dynamics can be critical for policy makers wanting to maximize welfare outcomes in social protection programs.

Behavioural interventions that leverage social norms are widely used to foster energy conservation. For instance, home energy reports combine information on others' behaviour (descriptive feedback) and approval for norm compliant behaviour (injunctive feedback). In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated how descriptive and injunctive feedbacks interact to affect electricity use, and evaluate the effects of additional normative feedback presented in the form of descriptive or injunctive energy conservation norm primes. We found that consistent descriptive and injunctive feedback boosts the effectiveness of social information in inducing energy conservation. When descriptive and injunctive feedback are in conflict, conservation behaviour is a function of the relative strength of the two types of feedback. Additional normative feedback produces smaller gains when it reinforces existing information of the same type. These results suggest complementarities between different types of normative messages rather than superiority of any one kind of feedback.

We propose a simple theory of social norms that models the distinct influence on behavior of personal values, normative expectations and empirical expectations. The first and second moments of the distribution of normative expectations affect the strength of social norms' pull on behavior. We test the empirical predictions of the model through an experiment based on a variant of the dictator game. Consistent with the theory, we find that normative expectations influence generosity and that higher dispersion of such expectations leads to more variation in giving behavior.

External financing of local public goods can potentially create 'political resource curses' by reducing citizen oversight, exacerbating elite capture, and producing policy outcomes that are sub-optimal for the general population. This paper experimentally tests a novel mechanism that seeks to mitigate elite capture of local development projects. Control communities are provided with block grants to fund local public goods, while households in treatment communities are provided with vouchers that they may either contribute to a public good or redeem at a discount for a private capital good. We find that the use of vouchers as a mechanism for aid delivery increases community participation in local public decision-making, changes the nature of allocation outcomes, and improves community satisfaction with allocation outcomes.

We study whether leaders influence the unethical conduct of followers. To avoid selection issues present in natural environments, we use an experiment in which we create simple laboratory firms and assign leadership roles at random. In our first experiment, firms engage in competition and unethical behavior enhances firm earnings but produces a negative externality for all firms. We vary, by treatment, two instruments through which leaders can influence follower conduct—prominent statements to the group and the allocation of monetary incentives. We find that leaders influence the ethical conduct of followers both through their statements and through the use of incentives. Moreover, leaders who are likely to have acted dishonestly in a preliminary stage of the experiment are more likely to employ mechanisms to encourage dishonesty among followers. As a result, firms randomly assigned one of these unethical leaders are more likely to engage in misreporting. A second experiment finds that the above relationships are present, though weaker, when firms do not engage in direct competition. (JEL: C92, D73, M14).

We use a field experiment to test whether saving and borrowing satisfy demand for lump-sum accumulation from regular deposits. Inspired by ROSCAs, we offer different credit and saving contracts to subjects. We find that individuals often accept both credit and saving contract across experimental waves. This behaviour can be rationalised by assuming that individuals seek lump-sum payments and struggle to hold savings. Structural estimation of this model accounts for the behaviour of 75% of participants. Of these, two-thirds have high demand for lump-sum accumulation but savings difficulties. These results imply that the distinction between microlending and microsaving is largely illusory.