Research on employer learning has provided important insights into the dynamic process that determines individual wages, especially during the early part of a worker's career. However, the recent evidence on the absence of employer learning for college graduates by Arcidiacono et al. (2008) and...

We challenge the recent claim that mispricing in the experimental asset markets introduced by Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988) is merely an artefact of confusion over declining fundamental value, and can be eliminated through appropriate training. We instead propose that when training is...

Resit exams – extra opportunities to do an exam in the same academic year – are widely prevalent in European higher education, but uncommon in the US. I present a simple theoretical model to compare rational student behavior in the case of only one exam opportunity versus the case of two...

This paper deals with one of the main empirical problems associated with the rational addiction theory, namely that its derived demand equation is not empirically distinguishable from models with forward looking behavior, but with time inconsistent preferences. The implication is that, even when...

Acquiring information about destinations can be costly for migrants. We model information frictions in the rational inattention framework and obtain a closed-form expression for a migration gravity equation that we bring to the data. The model predicts that ows from countries with a higher cost...

We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own quot;deep valuesquot; and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define quot;who they are.quot;...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral...

Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

The literature on happiness shows that there are many factors that influence a person s happiness. Extending previous studies, we investigate the role of the freedom of choice as a key contributing construct in influencing a person s happiness. We define two hypothetical sub-constructs for the...

We devise a new experimental game by nesting a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. With it, we study tensions between egalitarianism, equity concerns, self-interest, and the need for incentives. In a 2x2 design, subjects either vote on or exogenously...