This research explores the origins of loss aversion and the variation in its prevalence across regions, nations and ethnic group. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the evolution of loss aversion in the course of human history can be traced to the adaptation of...

Over the last three decades, average income for the bottom half of the US distribution increased by 8% while their average saving rate decreased by eight percentage points. Over the same period the US experienced a substantial increase in inequality and a continuous decrease in the aggregate...

The Dutch mandatory pension system consists of two parts: a public pay-as-you-go part that provides a minimum income to all Dutch inhabitants over age 64; and an occupation-specific capital-funded part that provides supplementary retirement income. The goal of this paper is to test for the effect...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists' minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

We show that individuals who are in poorer health, independently from smoking, are more likely to start smoking and to smoke more cigarettes than those with better non-smoking health. We present evidence of selection, relying on extensive data on morbidity and mortality. We show that health...

In this paper, we focus on possible causal mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of human capital. For this purpose, we use both an adoption and a twin design and study the effect of parents' education on their children's cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and health. Our...

We study the relationship between early life health and adult earnings using a unique dataset that covers almost the entire population of Swedish males born between 1950 and 1970. The health information is obtained from medical examinations during the mandatory military enlistment tests at age...

A large number of studies in labor economics estimate the returns to schooling using data on monozygotic twins, under the assumption that educational attainment is random within twin pairs. This exogeneity assumption has been commonly questioned, however, but there is to date little evidence on...

Research on intergenerational income mobility is based on current income since data on lifetime income are typically not available for two generations. However, using snapshots of income over shorter periods causes a so-called life-cycle bias if the snapshots cannot mimic lifetime outcomes....