Social preference research has fundamentally changed the way economists think about many important economic and social phenomena. However, the empirical foundation of social preferences is largely based on laboratory experiments with self-selected students as participants. This is potentially...

Employing a variant of GARP, we study consistency in aging by comparing the choices of younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA) in a 'simple', two-good and a `complex' three-good condition. We find that OA perform worse than YA in the complex condition but similar in the simple condition....

We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment where subjects dynamically choose their portfolio allocation between a safe and a risky asset. We first derive analytically the optimal allocation of an expected utility maximizer with HARA utility function. We then fit the experimental choices to...

This Paper looks at public sector pay in Britain. We present a novel instrument that exploits the variation in public sector status across individuals arising from the privatisation programme of the 1990s. We show formally that results that are estimated may thereby be robust to self-selection...

We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship most likely reflect a failure to properly control for the fact the individuals...

Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual...

The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish...

This paper discusses recent neuroeconomic evidence related to other-regarding behaviours and the decision to trust in other people’s other-regarding behaviour. This evidence supports the view that people derive non-pecuniary utility (i) from mutual cooperation in social dilemma (SD) games and...