Probabilistic risk beliefs are key drivers of economic and health decisions, but people are not always certain about their beliefs. We study these "imprecise probabilities", also known as ambiguous beliefs. We show that imprecision is measurable separately from the levels of risk beliefs. People...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why risk taking is related to optimism. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that the degree of optimism predicts whether people tend to focus on the positive or negative outcomes of risky decisions. While optimists tend to focus on the good...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...