This paper investigates whether people’s ability to withstand and adapt to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – is determined early on in childhood. Using nationally representative longitudinal data that tracks almost 3,000 children into adulthood, we show that the...

The world-wide inflation in executive compensation in recent years has been accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of long-term incentives. This article demonstrates how the subjectively perceived value of long-term incentives is affected by risk aversion, uncertainty aversion, and time...

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task – and then how they spillover to subsequent eating behaviour. Compared to a control...

Many people believe that prevailing commission rates for residential real estate brokers are "too high" but do not offer a formal model. This paper presents a general equilibrium model of the housing market in which real estate brokers serve as matching intermediaries. We use this model to...

We examine an evolutionary model of preferences in a society where resources are finite. Agents who develop better strategies for bargaining and trading will grow to dominate the population. We show that successful agents will have preferences that exhibit the "endowment effect". The social...

This essay illustrates that if Savage's small world assumption is relaxed, one can construct a theory of bounded rationality that incorporates some of the insights from recent work in cognitive psychology. The theory can be used to explain why contracts are incomplete and the existence of...