Michael G. Cuna

Despite expanded access to selective colleges, first-generation students often trail their peers in educational and early-career outcomes. We study one mechanism: the hidden curriculum — implicit, unwritten practices critical to educational and career success such as networking. First, we use data from over 70,000 students across 20 public universities to identify a first-generation gap in investment in hidden-curriculum actions. Second, in a field experiment at UC Berkeley, we show an information intervention increases take-up of hidden-curriculum actions by 13pp, closing roughly 77% of the baseline gap. Finally, an online experiment with AI college advisors shows that first- and continuing-generation students exert similar information-acquisition effort, but respond differently to hidden-curriculum nudges. Proactive information about returns eliminates this gap. The results highlight that asymmetric information about potential strategies and returns may prevent equal access from delivering equal opportunity and equal outcomes.

From newborns to the elderly, exposure to violence and conflict has been found to have deleterious effects. In this study, we explore a unique type of violence: exposure to the Taliban. Pairing a field experiment with a field survey among citizens in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan, we examine how exposure to violence affects general trust, subjective well-being, and confidence in institutions. In our field experiment, we observe that exposure to conflict significantly alters the relative valuation of monetary rewards for oneself compared to those for a comparable peer. Specifically, individuals subjected to violence demonstrate a marked tendency to prioritize their own financial gain over that of a similar other.  In the survey, we find that exposure to violence is associated with reduced general trust, trust in informal institutions, and subjective well-being. Interestingly, being exposed to violence increases trust in formal institutions.  Our combined results highlight that the interplay between violence and trust dynamics is complex and highly consequential.  In turn, the policy implications highlight the need for a multifaceted strategy to support individuals and communities affected by violence, ensuring both immediate relief and long-term resilience.

Contingent Valuation (CV) is a widely used method to obtain value estimates for nonmarket goods and services.  In this study, we ask: what are people telling us when they vote in a CV survey? Our answer is that they are telling us two things simultaneously: how much they value the public good and how much they value voting yes. The first matters only if the program is implemented. The second is consumed the moment the vote is cast. Since one’s vote is almost never pivotal, in such exercises the good is heavily discounted while the yes vote is not. This fact explains why CV responses tend to be insensitive to both price and scope.  Further, this can explain why standard CV estimates can substantially overstate WTP.  By leveraging a field experiment with over five thousand U.S. adults, we show how to separate the two motives.  This is completed using the Deepwater Horizon instrument and placing a real incentive, minutes off the survey, inside the same CV vote.  This allows us to price hypothetical stakes in real units. We find that roughly three-quarters of the conventional $341 WTP reflects the value of voting yes rather than the value of a cleaner Gulf. Environmentalists, it turns out, do not value the Gulf much more than others. They value voting for it more.

Understanding the role of preferences, beliefs, and constraints on social and wealth inequities is a key unlock for economic growth.  This study focuses on the inter-relationship between risk and ambiguity preferences of mothers, their early childhood investments, and their children's outcomes.  To do so, we jointly elicit ambiguity attitude and risk aversion preference parameters from more than 6000 randomly sampled mothers from nearly 500 villages in the district of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Across several measures of mothers' investment in nutrition of their children between the ages of 0-6, we find a robust and stable positive correlation of estimated ambiguity attitude and risk aversion parameters with maternal investments in children:  the more risk and ambiguity averse the mother, the greater her maternal investments.  Such investments are correlated with better children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as mothers with greater risk and ambiguity aversion have children with superior skills, even after accounting for socio-economic differences. Importantly, the positive effect of ambiguity and risk aversion on early-life outcomes can attenuate the negative impact of proxies of socio-economic disadvantage, such as illiteracy of the mothers, belonging to historically discriminated social groups, no exposure to radio, television, or zero access to mobile phones for all measures of cognitive and non-cognitive early-life skills.