The aim of this study was to elucidate how individual differences in noncognitive skills, as measured by the Big Five personality traits, explain variation in labor market outcomes. Japanese and U.S. survey data were analyzed to examine the associations between personality traits and later...

Studies in psychology have long argued the possibility that sibling structure, such as birth order and the gender of siblings, shapes one's feminine and masculine personality traits, such as a preference for competition. In light of recent developments in the economics literature on the gender...

In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

This paper explores the consequences of cognitive dissonance, coupled with timeinconsistent preferences, in an intertemporal decision problem with two distinct goals: acting decisively on early information (vision) and adjusting flexibly to late information (flexibility). The decision maker...

This paper provides evidence from Internet-based, large-scale survey data of hypothetical choice experiment on the relative utility hypothesis. The methodology exploited here complements previous empirical results from happiness studies, incentivized choice experiment studies, and neuroscience...

This paper investigates the individual outcomes of irrational thinking, including paranormality and non-scientific thinking. These modes of thinking are identified by factor analysis from a 2008 survey. Income and happiness are used as measures of performance. Empirical results reveal that...

Ever since the classical works of Smith and Veblen, economists have recognized that individuals care about their relative positions and status in addition to their own consumption. This paper addresses a new framework of choice experiments in order to specify the shape of utility function with...

Temporary agency work (TAW) is believed to facilitate the matching between firms and on-the-job searchers. This leads to shortening of the unemployment and job search duration. On the other hand, firms that hire temporary workers have less incentive to train them, which makes it difficult for...

Analysis of an original nationwide Internet survey reveals that health-related behavior shows associations with three aspects of time discounting: (i) impatience, measured by the overall discount rate; (ii) present bias, measured by the degree of declining impatience in the generalized hyperbolic...

This paper investigates whether smokers exhibit greater time discounting than non-smokers, and how short-term nicotine deprivation affects time discounting. A unique feature of our experiment is that our subjects receive rewards not only of money, but also of actual tobacco. This is done in...