We show that cyclical skill mismatch, defined as mismatch between the skills supplied by college graduates and skills demanded by hiring industries, is an important mechanism behind persistent career loss from graduating in recessions. Using Norwegian data, we find a strong countercyclical...

This paper studies the role of family background in explaining differences in the willingness to compete. By combining data from a lab experiment conducted with a representative sample of adolescents in Norway and high quality register data on family background, we show that family background is...

Despite macroeconomic evidence pointing to a negative aggregate consumption response due to political uncertainty, few papers have used microeconomic panel data to analyze how households adjust their consumption after an uncertainty shock. We study household savings and expenditure adjustment...

I estimate the effects of public health insurance on consumption smoothing and investigate the extent to which the public insurance interacts with private arrangements of self-insurance. Exploiting a dramatic expansion in health insurance coverage in rural China, I find that the introduction of...

I address the causes of the gender wage gap with a new dynamic model of wage, hours, and job changes that permits me to decompose the gap into a portion due to gender differences in preferences for part-time work and in onstraints. The dynamic model allows the differences in constraints to...

Can television be used to teach and foster entrepreneurship among youth in developing countries? We report from a randomized control field experiment of an edutainment show on entrepreneurship broadcasted over almost three months on national television in Tanzania. The field experiment involved...

The paper reports from an experiment studying how the aversion to lying is affected by non-economic dimensions of the choice situation. Specifically, we study whether people are more or less likely to lie when the content of the lie is personal, when they base decisions on intuition, and when...

We conduct a laboratory experiment where third-party spectators can redistribute resources between two agents, thereby offsetting the consequences of controllable and uncontrollable luck. Some spectators go to the limits and equalize all or no inequalities, but many follow an interior allocation...

Standard ways of measuring real income are known to be inconsistent with consumer preferences. We provide preference-consistent estimates of real income, based on the income-specific price indices that are consistent with nonhomothetic preferences. We find that existing measures, such as Geary,...

We report an experimental test of the four touchstones of rationality in choice under risk – utility maximization, stochastic dominance, expected-utility maximization and small-stakes risk neutrality – with students from one of the best universities in the United States and one of the best...