The lottery of birth draws some children into deprived environments and others into environments where they thrive. In a field experiment in rural India with 10-20 months old children we test two scalable interventions to reduce early disadvantages in health and mental development. We distribute...

This paper generalizes the price discrimination framework of Mussa and Rosen (1978) by considering salience-driven consumer preferences in the sense of Bordalo et al. (2013b). Consumers with salience-driven preferences give a higher weight to attributes that vary more. This reduces the...

The paper explores how repeated revisions of consumption plans increase long-run utility. If agents value present anticipations of future consumption, some revisions may be viewed as a benign form of self-delusion. We consider a minimal generalization of the Samuelson discounted utility model to...

A common approach to defining equivalence scales is to consider a household modelled as if it maximizes a single utility function. This may be founded on an assumption of the household maximizing a welfare function of individual utilities. For a positive analysis of the household, this may be...

In 1967, John Krutilla suggested a relationship between car camping, canoe cruising, and cross-country skiing and induced demand for wild, primitive, and wilderness-related opportunities. Here, the time trend of cross-section parameter estimates of the relationship is examined. Households...

Do households' recycling efforts represent a social cost, which should be taken into account in cost-benefit analyses of alternative waste treatment systems? Some argue that it should not, since recycling efforts are to a large extent voluntary. We demonstrate that if the government can...

The econometric implementation of rational addiction theory has been highly influenced by Becker, Grossman and Murphy (BGM). They specify an Euler equation where current consumption is determined by current price and past and future consumption. This model is claimed to be able to discriminate...

We investigate the impact of plant downsizing on disability pension utilization in Norway. Plant downsizing substantially increases the disability entry rate of workers in affected plants. Workers originally employed in plants that closed between 1993 and 1998 were 27.9 percent more likely to...

We estimate the magnitude of social interaction effects in disability pension participation among older workers in Norway. Specifically, we investigate how a worker's propensity to draw disability benefits is affected by a plausibly exogenous shock to the disability entry rate of similarly-aged...

This study uses a simple theory model to examine how time preferences influence food choices made by individuals, which in turn have implications for their future health. The theory results demonstrate that individuals with higher bias for the present or lower patience will have poorer health...