We analyze a sample of nearly 40,000 gender-targeted online job vacancies in Vietnam from February 2019 to July 2020 to estimate wage offer premia for physical attractiveness and how they vary between genders. Specifically, we compare the monthly wages offered in matched vacancies with and without attractiveness requirements for job advertisements targeting men and women separately. Our findings indicate that physically attractive women are offered a wage premium of about five percentage points, whereas physically attractive men are not. Further analysis reveals that gender differences in the wage offer premia to physical attractiveness are mainly driven by attitudes toward gender roles and the perceived lack of fit rather than by the potential productivity-enhancing effects of physical attractiveness in certain occupations.

Do individuals trust experts' advice? Does the sector represented by these experts matter for trust and compliance? Do individuals prefer the public or the private sector for large-scale responses to events such as the pandemic? We answer these questions by means of a large-scale survey on a representative sample of 9,444 respondents from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. We study if opinions on risk-mitigating actions against Covid-19 are shaped by expert recommendations and the sectors they represent. We identify a backlash against experts' recommendations that is robust across expert sectors and countries, and more pronounced for recommendations that require more effort to implement. We also find that, even for individuals with a low level of trust in the public sector, there is widespread agreement that governments should be preferred over the private sector to lead the production and distribution of vaccines. Most respondents, even those expressing distrust in governments, believe that governments should get involved in producing the vaccine for Covid-19, either exclusively or in a partnership with the private sector. This result is stronger for the distribution of the vaccine than for its production.

We report a laboratory experiment testing whether social reference points impact effort provision. Subjects are randomly assigned the role of worker or peer and the worker observes the peer’s earnings before participating in a real-effort task. Between treatments, we exogenously manipulate peer earnings. We find that the workers recall the earnings of their peer and are less satisfied with their own earnings when their peer earns more. Despite this, we do not observe a treatment effect in effort choices. Thus, although our subjects appear to care about income differentials, this does not translate to a change in behavior in our incentivized environment. We relate our results to recent studies of inequality and effort provision.

We introduce a banking sector and heterogeneous agents in the Matsuyama et al. (2016) dynamic over-lapping generations neoclassical model with good and bad projects. The model captures the benefits and costs of an advanced banking system which can facilitate economic development when allocates resources to productive activities but can also hamper progress when invests in projects that do not contribute to capital formation. When the economy achieves higher stages of development it becomes prone to cycles. We show how the disparity of incomes across agents de-pends on changes in both the prices of the factors of production and the reallocation of agents across occupations.

We introduce endogenous fire sales into a simple network model. For any given initial distribution of shocks across the network, we develop a clearing algorithm to solve for the financial equilibrium. We then utilise the results to perform ex ante risk assessment and derive risk premia for every balance sheet item where liabilities are differentiated according to priority rights. We find that risk premia reflect both idiosyncratic risk and risk of contagion (network risk). Moreover, we show that network risk magnifies the gap between the risk premia of equity and debt. We also perform comparative statics, showing that changes to the distribution of shocks and network structure can have substantial effects on the level of systemic losses.

Within the context of the Brexit referendum, we show that changes in the perception of social norms impact behavior. The referendum revealed new information about views over immigrants at country level. This new information caused a shift in the social norm which made xenophobic expressions more acceptable. At the margin, some of these expressions involve hate crime. We argue that the post-referendum behavioral change increased in the level of surprise at the referendum result, and that observed geographical variations of the effect depend on underlying local views on immigrants. Survey data corroborate these uncovered facts and support our theoretical mechanism.

This paper investigates self-serving belief distortion about dominant norms of honesty. We consider an environment where the subject can earn a monetary reward by lying. In contrast to the existing literature on motivated beliefs, we do not focus on distortion in one dimension alone, but instead consider beliefs in two dimensions, both of which have been shown to affect individual behavior: empirical (what other people do) and normative (what other people approve of). Our experimental findings are consistent with the predictions of a dual-self model in which conditional norm-followers strategically distort their beliefs to justify self-serving behavior. We argue that the asymmetry between what we infer from empirical as opposed to normative information is a key ingredient of belief distortion in our context: widespread honest behavior is a strong indicator of disapproval of lying (and thus that a norm of honesty is followed), but the opposite does not hold. Taken together, we show why, when, and which norm-relevant beliefs are strategically distorted.