We use eight waves from the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001) to analyze the intertemporal labor supply behavior of married women in six European countries (Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and United Kingdom) using dynamic binary choice models with different initial...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

Neoclassical economic theory rules out systematic errors in consumption choice. According to the basic view, individuals know what they choose. They are able to predict how much utility an activity or a good produces for them now and in the future and they can maximize their utility. This...

In the literature theoretical models have appeared that predict a positive impact of the level of individual wealth on the job exit probability. Empirically this prediction is most likely to be relevant for elderly workers who have been able to accumulate wealth throughout their working life and...

The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

We analyze the impact of (over-)confidence on gender differences in expected starting salaries using elicited beliefs of prospective university students in Germany. According to our results, female students have lower wage expectations and are less overconfident than their male counterparts....

We provide experimental evidence of behavior consistent with the sunk cost effect. Subjects who earned a lottery via a real-effort task were given an opportunity to switch to a dominant lottery; 23% chose to stick with their dominated lottery. The endowment effect accounts for roughly only one...

Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies - such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation - yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

The empirical literature testing the economic theory of crime has extensively studied the relative importance of the probability and the severity of punishment with reference to planned criminal activities. There are, however, also unplanned crimes and in this paper we focus on a very serious...

For trans people (i.e. people whose gender is not the same as the sex they were assigned at birth) evidence suggests that transitioning (i.e. the steps a trans person may take to live in the gender with which they identify) positively affects positivity towards life, extraversion, ability to...