Why the Referential Treatment: Evidence from Field Experiments on Referrals

We would like to thank David Autor, Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Patrick Bayer, Raj Chetty, Melissa Dell, David Deming, Itzik Fadlon, Adam Guren, John Friedman, Roland Fryer, Edward Glaeser, Claudia Goldin, Josh Goodman, Rick Hornbeck, Lisa Kahn, Lawrence Katz, John List, Ben Schoefer, Sarah Turner, Marty West, seminar participants at Berkeley, Booth, Brookings Institution, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Kellogg, and NBER Summer Institute Labor Studies, the New York Federal Reserve, Princeton, RAND, University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, and Wharton, as well as Jesse Shapiro and four anonymous referees for their many helpful comments and suggestions. We would like to thank John Horton and the oDesk Corporation for help running the experiment. Sophie Wang provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at Harvard is gratefully acknowledged. Amanda Pallais's email address is apallais@fas.harvard.edu and Emily Glassberg Sands's email address is esands@coursera.org. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.