This article examines the extent to which early childhood socioeconomic differences emerge in hyperactivity, impulsivity and persistence, all of which are psychometric analogues to how economists conceptualise time discounting. We control for a wide range of factors including parental investment...

We explore intertemporal decision making to test the extent to which elicited discount rates and a self-reported scale of impatience measure the same behavioral characteristic. We conduct experiments in which we elicit discount rates using monetary rewards and a self-reported measure of...

The paper formulates the fertility choice of a representative working woman in the context of a two-period OLG model. The starting point is a young working woman faced with the dilemma of having to simultaneous rear children and participate in the labor force. Discrete variable equivalents of...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

Using the Bank of Italy's Survey of Households Income and Wealth (SHIW) covering a 5-year panel, we measure the impact of the degree of households' financial literacy on the quota of housing investment in their portfolio. We find that households with higher levels of financial literacy hold a...

Men are strikingly more optimistic about the future performance of key economic and financial indicators than women. We report surprisingly strong and highly significant gender differences in consumer confidence data of seventeen out of eighteen countries, including the US. We confirm these...

This paper introduces an emerging interdisciplinary research field, namely neuroeconomics, which uses the neuroscientific methods to investigate the neural systems supporting economically relevant behaviors. Traditional economic research is restricted to the level of describing decision...

The internal audit function has received increasing attention as an important component of government financial management and a tool for improving the performance of the government sector. Recently, a consensus has been reached on what audit standards governments should meet. This paper reviews...

This article reconsiders the relationship between government debt and welfare in a two-country overlapping-generations model with lifetime uncertainty and international product differentiation. It has recently been proposed that a higher steady-state debt level may be welfare-enhancing in this...

This study estimates the adequacy of retirement wealth of pre-retirement households using a 1995 national sample of households. Retirement wealth is projected using planned retirement age and portfolio allocation. Retirement needs are estimated from expenditure functions, and 52% of the...