Concern about the high poverty rates experienced by children in female-headed households has led to policies aimed at increasing these households' income. In this paper we present a model that analyzes decisions made before and during marriage to invest in the human capital of parents and...

This paper examines the determinants of economic growth, income inequality, and their relationship in the context of education inequality. The econometrics indicate that a higher level of human capital and the relative dispersion of human capital have a disequalizing relationship with income...

It is well-known that subjects can exhibit a preference for increasing payments. Smith (2009a) makes a related prediction that the difference between the preference increasing wage payments and the preference for increasing non-wage payments will be largest for intermediate payments. We find...

The purpose of the study is to better understand human capital investment decisions of the working poor, and to collect information that can be used to design a policy to induce the poor to invest in human capital. We use laboratory experimental methodology to elicit the preferences and observe...

We reconcile �findings from the Multiple Price List method (Andersen et al., 2008) and the Convex Time Budget method (Andreoni and Sprenger, 2012a) that seem to have generated a heated debate in the time preference literature. Specifi�cally, we discuss the claims of Andreoni and Sprenger...

Procrastination is the notorious tendency to postpone work for tomorrow. This paper presents a formal model of procrastination based on expectations and prospect theory, which differs signficantly from the prevalent model of O’Donoghue and Rabin. Subject is assumed to work on a task for...

We define an intergenerational social welfare function Sigma from |R^|N (the set of all infinite-horizon utility streams) into *|R (the ordered field of hyperreal numbers). The function Sigma is continuous, linear, and increasing, and is well-defined even on unbounded (e.g. exponentially...

This paper experimentally studies the effects of background music and sound on the preference of the decision makers for rewards in pairwise intertemporal choice tasks and lottery choice tasks. The participants took part in the current experiment, involving four treatments: (1) the familiar...

This paper shows that there is a positive and statistically significant correlation between the short-term discount rate over a monetary reward and the short-term discount rate over a primary reward (chocolate). This correlation, however, is absent among subjects who do not like chocolate and...

Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of income over a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a larger present discounted value. However, little is known about how these preferences vary with the size of the wage payments. In each of our three...