La mayoría de análisis y políticas económicas en el área de América Latina se centran en enfoques macroeconómicos de naturaleza coyuntural. Frente a este enfoque de corto plazo, la literatura sobre crecimiento destaca el papel que la inversión en capital físico, la inversión en capital...

The literature on innovation has traditionally seen imitation processes as harmful to the development of new technologies, adverse for growth and detrimental to the welfare of consumers, producers and society at large. However, as we show in our paper, despite this widespread belief, imitation...

Temptations are a largely unavoidable part of life. Resisting them is usually seen as a virtuous behavior. Recent research in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can detrimentally impact performance on immediately subsequent tasks. Using standard...

In this study we provide direct evidence on the relationship between social status and personality traits. Using survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the HRS, we show that individuals’ self-perceived social status is associated with all the “Big Five” personality traits, after...

We study the effect of alternative parental teaching strategies on the propensity to save and the amount saved during adulthood. Using a panel dataset from the Dutch DNB Household Survey we find that parental teaching to save increases the likelihood that an adult will save by 16%, and the...

We develop a structural econometric model to elicit household-specific expectations about future financial asset returns and risk attitudes by using data on observed portfolio holdings and self-assessed willingness to bear financial risk. Our framework assumes that household portfolios are...

Using the 2006 wave of the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this paper sheds light on the role jointly played by individuals’ financial risk tolerance and their level of trust in others (generalized trust) in affecting their risky assets investments. We document that...

What are the individual characteristics that predict unethical behavior? To answer this question we randomly interviewed 541 passengers who used the bus in Reggio Emilia (Italy). Exploiting the high level of fare evasion (43% without a valid ticket) we find that young, male and non-Caucasian...