People use information about their ability to choose tasks. If more challenging tasks provide more accurate information about ability, people who care about and who are risk averse over their perception of their own ability will choose tasks that are not sufficiently challenging. Overestimation...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology.

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...

Evidence during the nineties about the response of real wages to shocks highlights that this response is substantially lower in European countries than in the United States and that there are important differences among European countries. Which are the reasons that explain these different...

Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification. He showed that causal parameters are de fined using hypothetical models that assign variation to some of the inputs determining...

This paper proposes sequential matching and inverse selection probability weighting to estimate dynamic causal effects. The sequential matching estimators extend simple, matching estimators based on propensity scores for static causal analysis that have been frequently applied in the evaluation...

The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design (RDD) and proposes simple estimators. Quantile treatment effects are a very helpful tool to characterize the effects of certain interventions on the outcome distribution. The...