This paper focuses on the relation between the onset of disability and employment outcomes. We develop an event history model that includes unscheduled hospitalizations as a measure for unanticipated health shocks and estimate the model on data from the British National Child Development Study...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behaviour using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

Self-reported data on sexual behaviors have been criticized to be unreliable. In recent studies, risky sexual behaviors have therefore been measured using biomarkers for curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Nevertheless, no previous research have tested how reliable such data are. In...

A key open question for theories of reference-dependent references is what determines the reference point. One candidate is expectations: what people expect could affect how they feel about what actually occurs. In a real-effort experiment, we manipulate the rational expectations of subjects and...

A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) in the health-care sector is used to test the loss aversion theory that is derived from reference-dependent preferences: The absolute subjective value of a deviation from a reference point is generally greater when the deviation represents a loss than when the...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

Did the rise in anti-American sentiment caused by the Iraq war affect sales of US goods abroad? We address this question using data on soft drink and fabric detergent sales in nine Arab countries. We find a statistically significant negative impact of the war on sales of US soft drinks in seven...

Is the way that people make risky choices, or tradeoffs over time, related to cognitive ability? This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of the population and incentive compatible measures. We conduct...

This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties and discusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affective weight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual (‘utility interdependence’)....

Is the way that people make risky choices, or tradeoffs over time, related to cognitive ability? This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of the population and incentive compatible measures. We conduct...