Using the new macro data on risk aversion and patience by Falk et al. (2018), I show that risk aversion and patience are related to intelligence: high-IQ populations are more patient and more risk averse than low-IQ populations. The correlation between patience and intelligence corroborates...

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a a long-running Korean television quiz show. We find there is a gender gap in performance - in favour of boys - across episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain...

Empirical studies advocating the temporal variability of risk attitudes suggest that adverse covariate shocks significantly alter risk attitudes over time, but there is no consensus on the direction. In this paper, we investigate whether risk aversion increases or decreases in response to...

Most empirical studies assume only monotonic preferences for households. Behavioral research however providessubstantial evidence that preferences for wealth are measured relative to a reference point. In this paper weintroduce and solve a two-period consumption and savings model for a...

We consider an industry with firms that produce a final good emitting pollution to different degree as a side effect. Pollution is regulated by a tradable quota system where some quotas may have been allocated at the outset, i.e. before the quota market is opened. We study how volatility in...

An intriguing problem in stochastic growth theory is as follows: even when the return on investment is arbitrarily high near zero and discounting is arbitrarily mild, long run capital and consumption may be arbitrarily close to zero with probability one. In a convex one-sector model of optimal...

We examine the effect of demographic shifts on asset prices in an overlapping generations model with endogenous population dynamics. We establish a robust inverse relationship between returns and the old dependency ratio. We document the absence of a simple monotonic relationship between asset...

We measure individual-level loss aversion using three incentivized, representative surveys of the U.S. population (combined N=3,000). We find that around 50% of the U.S. population is loss tolerant, with many participants accepting negative-expected-value gambles. This is counter to earlier...

Economic research on entertainment is scant despite its large share of time use. We test economic theories of belief-based utility in the context of video-game engagement. Using data on 2.8 million matches from League of Legends, we find evidence supporting reference-dependent preferences, loss...

Income comparisons are important for individual well-being. We examine the shape of the relationship between relative income and life satisfaction, and test empirically if the features of the value function of prospect theory carry on to experienced utility. We draw on a unique dataset for a...