Early adulthood is a time of important transitions that shape the future of young adults. How do these transitions affect well-being, and to what degree can they account for the life satisfaction path followed during young adulthood? To answer these questions, longitudinal data from the Swedish...

This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is...

I develop a model of ideologies as collectively sustained (yet individually rational) distortions in beliefs concerning the proper scope of governments versus markets. In processing and interpreting signals of the efficacy of public and market provision of education, health insurance, pensions,...

It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because...

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or image-related) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this...

Prominent economic theories have emphasized the role of commonly held perceptions and expectations for determining macroeconomic outcomes. A key empirical question is how such collectively held beliefs are formed. We use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural experiment. We provide direct evidence...

We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. We find that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job...

We develop a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model yields ambiguous predictions on the sign of this relationship. On the one hand, given the number of firms, a deregulation reduces profits per unit of output, and...