Overconfidence is a well-established bias in which someone's subjective confidence in their own judgments is systematically greater than their objective accuracy. There is abundant anecdotal evidence that overconfident people increase their exposure to risk. In this paper, we test whether...

We study a psychologically based foundation for choice errors. The decision maker applies a preference ranking after forming a 'consideration set' prior to choosing an alternative. Membership of the consideration set is determined both by the alternative specific salience and by the rationality...

We model a boundedly rational agent who suffers from limited attention. The agent considers each feasible alternative with a given (unobservable) probability, the attention parameter, and then chooses the alternative that maximises a preference relation within the set of considered alternatives....

This paper extends the transformed maximum likelihood approach for estimation of dynamic panel data models by Hsiao, Pesaran, and Tahmiscioglu (2002) to the case where the errors are crosssectionally heteroskedastic. This extension is not trivial due to the incidental parameters problem that...

This paper addresses the selection of smoothing parameters for estimating the average treatment effect on the treated using matching methods. Because precise estimation of the expected counterfactual is particularly important in regions containing the mass of the treated units, we define and...

Consider a setting where a treatment that starts at some point during a spell (e.g. in unemployment) may impact on the hazard rate of the spell duration, and where the impact may be heterogeneous across subjects. We provide Monte Carlo evidence on the feasibility of estimating the distribution...

Cultural diversity is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Commonly used quantitative measures of the spatial distribution of culturally-defined groups – such as segregation, isolation or concentration indexes – are often only capable of identifying just one aspect of this distribution. The...

We investigate the impact of increases in wheat flour prices on household food security using unique nationally-representative data collected in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. We use a new estimator, the Unconditional Quantile Regression (UQR) estimator, based on influence functions to examine...

Using nationally-representative household survey data and confidential geo-coded data on violence, we examine the linkages between conflict, food insecurity, and food price shocks in Afghanistan. Spatial mappings of the raw data reveal large variations in levels of food insecurity and conflict...

To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...