It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newly available data on fertility preferences and outcomes, we show that indeed, babies are likely to arrive only if both parents desire one, and...

It has been shown that higher levels of subjective well-being lead to greater work productivity, better physical health and enhanced social skills. Because of these positive externalities, policymakers across the world should be interested in attracting and retaining happy and life-satisfied...

This paper proposes a method for empirically mapping psychological personality traits to economic preferences. Careful modelling of random components of decision making is crucial to establishing the long supposed but empirically elusive link between economic and psychological systems for...

This paper analyzes the exporting behaviour of manufacturing firms located in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys Database. It specifically examines the factors that determine the probability of exporting and the export intensity of...

This paper examines the role of social learning in household enrollment decisions for the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China by estimating a static game with incomplete information. Using a rich dataset from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we find that the social network...

Conceptually, adopting a life course approach when analysing residential mobility enables us to investigate how experiencing particular life events affects mobility decision-making and behaviour throughout individual lifetimes. Yet although a growing body of longitudinal research links mobility...

Trait-based personality psychology and economics have taken different approaches to understanding individual differences, with the former emphasizing variables derived from the factor analysis of trait assessments, and the latter emphasizing variables derived from formal decision theory. In a...

Residential mobility decisions are known to be made at the household level. However, most empirical analyses of residential mobility relate moving behaviour to the housing and neighbourhood satisfaction and pre-move thoughts of individuals. If partners in a couple do not share evaluations of...