This paper analyzes the relationship between individuals' locus of control and their savings behavior, i.e. wealth accumulation, savings rates, and portfolio choices. Locus of control is a psychological concept that captures individuals' beliefs about the controllability of life events and is a...

This paper bridges the financial market and the marriage market using a reference-dependent mechanism. Male-biased sex ratios induce families with sons to hold more risky assets, since competitive marital payment in a tight market raises the reference level of marriage expenditure for such...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large andpersistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regionsof four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and weexplore potential explanations for this...

In this paper we question the hypothesis of full rationality in the context of job changingbehaviour, via simple econometric explorations on microdata drawn from WHIP (WorkerHistories Italian Panel). Workers´ performance is compared at the end of a three-year timewindow that starts when choices...

State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program forsingle parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changesand their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reformsfrom the perspective of the...

In this paper we empirically examine differences in search behavior between men andwomen. We assess hypotheses regarding duration of search, wages and tenure. Thehypotheses are derived from two models: the equilibrium search model with discriminatoryfirms by Black (1995) and an opportunity cost...

This paper tests a central implication of the theory of equalizing differences, that workers sortinto jobs with different attributes based on their preferences for those attributes. We presentevidence from four new time-use data sets for the United States and France on whetherworkers who are...

Much of the recent literature in household economics has been critical of unitary models of household decision-making. Most alternative models currently used are bargaining models and consensual models, including collective models. This paper discusses another alternative: independent individual...

We explore the forces that shape the development of aspirations and the achievement of grades during high school and the role that these aspirations, grades, and other variables play in educational outcomes such as going to university and graduating. We find that parental expectations and peer...