Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

When agents have present bias, they discount more between now and the next period than between period t ( 1) and t + 1. How fast the future discount rate (evaluated today) decays is an empirical question. We show that the discount function can be non-parametrically identified with contracts that...

Microcredit is an innovative financial tool designed to reduce poverty and fix credit market imperfections. We use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south India to highlight behavioral features of microcredit. Conditional on borrowing from any source,...

This paper addresses the questions of what is an economically efficient pension system, what are the externalities and what are the risks of the four alternative pension systems: financial defined contribution (FDC), notional or non-financial defined contribution (NDC), financial defined benefit...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

This paper investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic behavior. We use a Swedish longitudinal dataset that links information from a large survey on children's time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Our...

While commitment devices such as defaults and direct deposits from wages have been found to be highly effective to increase savings, they are unavailable to the millions of people worldwide who not have a formal wage bill. Self-help peer groups are an alternative commitment device that is...

Individuals frequently face intertemporal decisions. For the purposes of economic analysis, the preference parameters assumed to govern these decisions are generally considered to be stable economic primitives. However, evidence on the stability of time preferences is notably lacking. In a large...