Each year, many pregnant Muslim women fast during Ramadan. Using Indonesian cross-sectional data and building upon work of Almond & Mazumder (2009), I show that people who were prenatally exposed to Ramadan fasting have a poorer general health than others. As predicted by medical theory, this...

This paper reports an experiment that examines the effects of price complexity on market prices. In my experimental posted-offer markets, each seller offers an identical good to buyers with homogeneous preferences. First, sellers simultaneously decide on the price and the tariff structure of...

The paper investigates risk attitudes among different types of individuals. We use several di erent measures of risk attitudes, including questions on choices between uncertain income streams suggested by Barsky et al. (1997) and a number of ad hoc measures. As in Barsky et al. (1997) and...

We employ a price setting duopoly experiment to examine whether buyer confusion increases market prices. Each seller offers a good to buyers who have homogeneous preferences. Sellers decide on the number of attributes of their good and set prices. The number of attributes bears no cost to the...

Understanding individual and social decisions and how they are affected by the environment and institutional constraints is at the heart of the the social sciences. With the exception of psychology, traditionally in the social sciences empirical evidence is gathered via happenstance data. Such...

We provide an explanation for the common finding that the effect of retirement on life satisfaction is negligible. For this we use subjective well-being measures for life and domains of life satisfaction that are available in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and show that the effect of...

This paper examines the impact of participants' age distribution on the asset allocation of Dutch pension funds, using a unique data set of pension fund investment plans for 2007. Theory predicts a negative effect of age on (strategic) equity exposures. We observe that pension funds do indeed...

This paper analyzes the effect of retirement on cognitive functioning using two large scale surveys. First, a longitudinal survey among older Americans allows controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement decision. Second, a cross-national European survey allows...

The paper provides a perspective on the development of the Belgian disability insurance system. Using both survey and administrative data, it sketches a picture of the (changing) factors leading towards disability, as well as the outcomes in terms of program participation. The paper shows the...

A majority of older Finns withdraw from employment via early retirement schemes years before the statutory retirement age. Over the past 15 years, a series of policy reforms have been introduced to reduce the widespread use of early exit pathways. By exploiting variation in eligibility rules...