This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from high and low socio-economic status (SES) families. We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less likely to be risk-seeking. To understand the...

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of the social environment in shaping the accuracy of self-assessment. We introduce a novel incentivized measurement tool to measure the accuracy of self-assessment among children and use this tool to show that children from high...

This paper reviews several traditions in economic research on preferences as well as research on personality traits in personality psychology and lists challenges in both fields. We discuss challenges regarding the measurement of preferences and personality traits, challenges regarding the...

Low self-control is considered a fundamental cause of crime. The aim of our study is to provide causal evidence on the link between self-control and criminal behavior. We test whether individuals with lower self-control behave in a more antisocial manner and are less risk-averse and thus are,...

This paper explores the individual and joint predictive power of concepts from economics, psychology, and criminology for individual norm enforcement behavior. More specifically, we consider economic preferences (patience and attitudes towards risk), personality traits from psychology (Big Five...

This paper studies self-control in a nationally representative sample. Using the wellestablished Tangney scale to measure trait self-control, we find that people's age as well as the political and economic institutions they are exposed to have an economically meaningful impact on their level of...

The motivation value of confidence postulates that individual effort provision is increasing in beliefs on one's own productivity. This relationship also holds for overconfident individuals who have exaggerated productivity beliefs (motivation value of overconfidence). We present first empirical...

Debates about affirmative action often revolve around fairness. Accordingly, we document substantial heterogeneity in the fairness perception of various affirmative action policies. But do these differences translate into different consequences? In a laboratory experiment, we study three...

Economic theory and empirical evidence establish that economic preferences predict behavior and life outcomes for children, adolescents, and adults. In this paper, we use novel data on 4,282 siblings aged 6 to 16 that combine incentivized measures of time, risk, and social preferences with...