Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a large-scale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, one-shot allocation tasks, allowing us...

We examine social preferences of Swedish and Austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of Charness and Rabin (2002). We find that difference aversion decreases while social-welfare preferences increase with age.<p>

We study household decision making in a high-stakes experiment with a random sample of households in rural China. Spouses have to choose between risky lotteries, first separately and then jointly. We find that spouses’ individual risk preferences are more similar the richer the household and...

Many economic decisions are made jointly within households. This raises the question about spouses’ relative influence on joint decisions and the determinants of relative influence. Using a controlled experiment (on inter-temporal choice), we let each spouse first make individual decisions and...

In an experiment, we study risk-taking of cohabitating student couples, finding that couples’ decisions are closer to risk-neutrality than single partners’ decisions. This finding is similar to earlier experiments with randomly assigned groups, corroborating external validity of earlier results.

This theoretical paper shows how a central government can induce a policy concerning a municipal matter through a package of a policy requirement and a grant. We find that, due to fiscal competition and the possibility for citizens to move between municipalities, the central government can make...

We study the motives behind parents’ transfers to their children, and the relationship between tangible transfers and educational investments. Another issue is the channels parents choose for tangible transfers. Do they use bequests and inter vivos gifts as substitutes or complements? We use a...

This paper studies the effects of public child-care subsidies on parental time allocation. We develop a model where parents are allowed to utilize subsidized care during both working and leisure hours. The model distinguishes between subsidies to child-care quality and to fees. Three types of...

Alcoholic beverages are taxed at very different rates across the European Union, which implies extensive cross-border shopping. Therefore, there is an ongoing debate about harmonization of alcohol taxes among countries. Sweden, with a tradition of high alcohol taxes due to public health...

Number of siblings has previously been found to adversely affect earned income. However, we still lack understanding of whether nature or nurture drives this effect. We examine in detail the effects of having different kinds of siblings and find that the number of siblings one grew up with has a...