Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

This paper explores the socially optimal level of insurance given that individuals are subject to behavioral biases, in particular narrow framing and loss aversion. The central issue of this normative analysis is whether or not a social welfare function (SWF) should take into consideration the...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks, such as unconfirmed transfers, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated currencies as a means of payment but this competition is not...

This paper studies the effects of social comparison on risk taking be- havior. In our framework, decision makers evaluate the consequences of their choices as changes with respect to both their own and their peers’ conditions. We test experimentally whether different positions in the social...

We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of catastrophic damages, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether a threshold for dangerous climate change is as an effective coordination device for countries to overcome...

We study the impact of loss-aversion and the threat of catastrophic damages, which we jointly call threshold concerns, on international environmental agreements. We aim to understand whether a threshold for dangerous climate change is as an effective coordination device for countries to overcome...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks including unconfirmed transactions, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated money but consumers may prefer one currency over the other. In...

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...

This paper exploits data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to re-examine the gender wage gap in Germany on the basis of inequality-adjusted measures of wage differentials which fully account for gender differences in pay distributions. The inequalityadjusted gender pay gap measures are...