A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available...

When we take a cab we may feel cheated if the driver takes an unnecessarily long route despite the lack of a contract or promise to take the shortest possible path. Is our decision to take the cab affected by our belief that we may end up feeling cheated? Is the behavior of the driver affected...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming...

This paper reviews the literature on culture and economics, focusing primarily on the epidemiological approach. The epidemiological approach studies the variation in outcomes across different immigrant groups residing in the same country. Immigrants presumably differ in their cultures but share...

We contribute to the literature on the effects of personality traits on labour market outcomes focusing on time mismanagement as an underlying mechanism. We document differences in time allocation to the labour market by different personality types in the UK and show how they may account for...

This paper reviews the literature concerning the evolution of cultural traits in general and preferences in particular, and the emergence and persistence of rules or norms, from a family perspective. In models where every new person is effectively the clone of an existing one (either a parent or...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

We study how the work effort and output of non-migrants in a village economy are affected when a member of the village population migrates. Given that individuals dislike low relative income, and that migration modifies the social space of the non-migrants, we show why and how the non-migrants...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...

There is much interest among cultural economists in assessing the effects of heritage preservation policies. There has been less interest in modeling the policy choices made in historic and cultural landmark preservation. This paper builds an economic model of a landmark designation that...