This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people's involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears,...

This paper reviews the literature on gender and culture. Gender gaps in various outcomes (competitiveness, labor force participation, and performance in mathematics, amongst many others) show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time. The economics literature...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

This survey is devoted to the statistical analysis of duration models and point processes. The first section introduces specific concepts and definitions for single-spell duration models. Section two is devoted to the presentation of conditional duration models which incorporate the effects of...

The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often place employees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second, demotions are extremely rare. Why do organizations not correct 'wrong' promotion decision? This paper...

This paper examines the effects of the Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples in Britain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using panel data from the British...

In the last twenty years a growing body of experimental evidence has posed a challenge to the standard Exponential Discounting Model of choice over time. Attention has focused on some specific 'anomalies', notably preference reversal and declining discount rates, leading to the formulation of...

Traditional instrumental variable estimators do not generally estimate effects for the treated population but for the unobserved population of compliers. They do identify effects for the treated when there is one-sided perfect non-compliance. However, this property is lost when covariates are...