Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is...

Despite its importance for the analysis of life-cycle behavior and, in particular, retirement planning, stock ownership by private households is poorly understood. Among other approaches to investigate these puzzles, recent research has started to elicit private households’ expectations of...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's preferences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplifed questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers and...

Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. Another possible mechanism, employer discrimination, has found little support. In this paper, we provide some evidence in favor of the...

This paper investigates long-run effects of episodes of hunger experienced as a child on health status and behavioral outcomes in later life. It combines self-reported data on hunger experiences from SHARELIFE, a retrospective survey conducted as part of SHARE in Europe in 2009, with...

Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of...

We analyze the long-term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation, in particular in the politician market, exploiting variation in sex ratios across Germany induced by WWII. In the 1990 elections, women were more likely to run for office in constituencies that had...

Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after WWII and construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces providing regional and temporal variation. We correlate hunger exposure...

Population aging and pension reform will have profound effects on international capital markets. First, demographic change alters the time path of aggregate savings within each country. Second this process may be amplified when a pension reform shifts old-age provision towards more pre-funding....

This book develops a dynamic programming framework for the analysis of firms' joint investment and market exit decisions and reviews methods for econometric estimation of such models. In an empirical application of this framework, a version of this model that allows for financial constraints is...