Women’s labor force participation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is very low, at 14 percent. This paper investigates a number of social and psychological barriers to participation, using recent methods...
Studies have encouraged pro-social behavior by experimentally manipulating people's views of what others like them tend to do (descriptive norms). These studies positively change behaviors, including charitable...
Declines in rates of child stunting in the Philippines have decelerated, making it hard for the country to achieve its targets on nutritional outcomes. The knowledge base, beliefs, and practices of caregivers...
This study conducted a large-scale, representative survey of social norms for female labor force participation in three governorates of Jordan. The social norms measures are disaggregated into thematic...
Toilet ownership in India has grown in recent years, but open defecation can persist even when rural households own latrines. There are at least two pathways through which social norms inhibit the use...
A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US population, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial...
Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth. Little is known about how to improve it in resource-constrained settings. This study describes a field trial of a social recognition...
A large literature focuses on the biases of individuals and consumers, as well as "nudges" and other policies that can address those biases. Although policy decisions are often more consequential than...
International development policy is ripe for an overhaul.Behavioral science can help policy makers to spur changes in behaviors that are difficult to explain from a conventional economic perspective and...
Theoretical accounts of compliance with court orders emphasize the importance of transparency. Most empirical studies of compliance center on high profile political cases, largely ignoring the high-volume...
The Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, were a global agreement to promote human development and reduce poverty. But they did not create a legalized institutional regime, in which precise...
Global poverty is a huge problem in today's world. This survey article seeks to be a first guide to those who are interested in, but relatively unfamiliar with, the main issues, positions, and arguments...
Optimism about the use of laws, constitutions, and rights to achieve social change has never been higher among practitioners. But the academic literature is skeptical that courts can direct resources toward...
The capacity to act collectively is not just a matter of groups sharing interests, incentives, and values (or being sufficiently small), as standard economic theory predicts, but a prior and shared understanding...
A key issue with human rights is how to allocate duties correlative to rights claims. But the philosophical literature, drawing largely on naturalistic or interactional accounts of human rights, develops...
This paper assesses the benefits, risks, and limitations of human rights based approaches to development, which can be catalogued on the basis of the institutional mechanisms they rely on: global compliance...
Redress procedures are important for basic fairness. In addition, they can help address principal-agent problems in the implementation of social policies and provide information to policy makers regarding...
The capacity to act collectively is not just a matter of groups sharing interests, incentives and values (or being sufficiently small), as standard economic theory predicts, but a prior and shared understanding...
Since the liberalization of India's economy beginning in the early 1990's, the government has increasingly employed contract workers to perform various state functions, including in the education sector...