In a multicommodity life cycle setting with uncertainty and time additive expected utility, this note finds necessary and sufficient conditions on preferences for all but one optimal decision each period to be independent of the future and of uncertainty.

Jekyll and Hyde were in fact two people inside the same person – an obviously dynamically inconsistent person. In the book and in the movie, the dynamic inconsistency was resolved in arather dramatic way. We investigate its resolution in the laboratory.

This paper studies how spouses' life satisfaction levels are correlated. Using the British Household Panel Survey, it tests whether the observed positive correlation in life satisfaction is due to assortative mating, shared social environment, or spillover effect of well-being between partners....

This paper develops a new class of homothetic preferences which generate Marshallian demand curves for individual goods which can be concave, convex or linear in own price under the assumption that agents treat aggregate price indices as given (as in the Dixit-Stiglitz (1977) monopolistic...

What determines human beings' political preferences? Using nationally representative longitudinal data, we show that having daughters makes people more likely to vote for left-wing political parties. Having sons leads people to favor right-wing parties. The paper checks that our result is not an...

We consider the comparative statics of consumer demand when there are consumption externalities in one commodity between two individuals. We show that the externality can switch goods which would naturally be normal into inferior goods and as a result th e externality can also lead to Giffen...

Little is known about why some human beings make risky life-choices. This paper provides evidence that people's health decisions and addictive actions are influenced by the gender of their children. Having a daughter leads individuals -- in micro data from Great Britain and the United States --...

While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of child’s own investments. Information on how children invest their time separately from parents is probably little informative for babies and...

We attempt to answer a simple empirical question: does having children make a parent live longer? The hypothesis we offer is that a parent's immune system is refreshed by a child's infections at a time when their own protection starts wearing thin. With the boosted immune system, the parent has...

Potentially dynamically-inconsistent individuals create particular problems for economics, as their behaviour depends upon whether and how they attempt to resolve their potential inconsistency. This paper reports on the results of a new experiment designed to help us distinguish between the...