What drives prosocial behavior and how it can be shaped through education interventions? This paper examines whether reading literary fiction can causally influence prosociality. In a pre-registered field experiment, university students were randomly assigned to one of two four-week extracurricular courses: a fiction-reading curriculum or a placebo course focused on behavioral science, with equivalent intensity and reading content. After the intervention, participants took part in experimental sessions featuring incentivized economic games and psychological scales.

In this paper, we analyze the effect of natural disasters on municipal fiscal outcomes. Unlike national governments, municipalities operate under distinct fiscal frameworks with limited local revenues and dependency on earmarked transfers. By analyzing the universe of Colombian municipalities, we identify a systemic pattern in which institutional rigidities inhibit fiscal adjustments. Using an event-study approach with data from 2000 to 2023, we find no statistically significant effect of disasters on fiscal outcomes, even in municipalities with high levels of preventive investment.

This paper studies how delays in diploma receipt affect the school-to-work transition and long-term labor market outcomes. In Colombia, graduating seniors can wait up to six months to receive their college diplomas after completing all degree requirements. Waiting times are largely determined by administrative procedures and vary considerably across and within programs. Exploiting within-program variation, we show that students experiencing longer delays are less likely to be employed one year after graduation and have significantly lower earnings ten years later.

Organizations often require employees to collaborate with others who may see the world differently, yet we know little about how misalignment in personal values affects performance within firms. Using survey and administrative data from a world-leading bank, we show that employees whose values diverge from their manager’s perform worse. This effect is not explained by demographic diversity, managerial biases or misalignment with organizational values.

We consider a collection of firms linked through equity-holdings whose managers choose risky investment decisions in response to an exogenous shock. Agency conflicts arising from a gap between the firm's value and a manager's present rewards (from shares, penalties, bonuses, etc.) or future career concerns will distort the manager's choices. The nature of the conflict determines whether they are overly conservative or overly risky, as well as the strategic complementarity or substitution of the managers‘ choices, independent of the underlying equity network.

This work emphasizes the central role of skill and altruism in development, understood as an increase in social welfare. In the basic model, skill expands the set of feasible payoffs, while altruism governs the private–social tradeoff in the decision maker’s choice. Higher altruism consistently increases social welfare. By contrast, higher skill needs not: capability expansions combine a positive frontier effect with an ambiguous reallocation effect, potentially toward actions that are privately attractive but socially harmful.

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This paper provides the first global analysis of the impact of conflict exposure on firm performance, combining geolocalized longitudinal firm-level data with information on political violence events across 89 countries between 2006 and 2019. Our results show that higher conflict exposure leads to declines in both sales and total costs, resulting in no significant effect on profits for surviving firms. The reduction in sales is driven by lower output, which reflects conflict-induced shortages of raw materials and production inputs, as well as increased informal competition.