The extent to which individuals discount the future and whether they discount in a time-consistent fashion is an important determinant of their life outcomes. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that direct exposure to violence substantially increases present...

We study the role of heuristic versus deliberative processing in intertemporal choice. Using studies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and an online labor market, we show that waiting periods - designed to prompt deliberation by temporally separating news about choice sets from choices...

This study explores how minority status influences individual decisions about investment in a post-conflict society. The study is based on multiple sources of evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina. First, we exploit an exogenous imposition of minority and majority positions by an as-if random...

Recent developments in economic theory model intertemporal choice decisions as problems of restraining one’s natural impulse to consume today. We use interventions that have been shown in the psychology literature to affect impulse control to examine whether this is indeed the case for...

We experimentally manipulate two aspects of the cognitive environment, cognitive depletion and recent sugar intake, and estimate their effects on individuals' time preferences in a way that allows us to identify the structural parameters of a simple (α,β,δ) intertemporal utility function for...