Self-esteem measures confidence in one’s abilities. Prior literature has shown that higher self-esteem can also affect individual financial decision making through an increased willingness to invest in risky assets and motivation to enhance self image through wealth accumulation. However,...

This study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine whether self-regulation, proxied by regularly dining together with family, is associated with better financial preparedness and greater wealth accumulation across time among households. Findings reveal that individuals who...

What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the effect of hypothetical personal experience on the adoption of a new insurance product in rural China. Specifically, we conduct a set of insurance games with a random subset of farmers. Our findings show that playing insurance games...

Individuals and asset managers trade aggressively, resulting in high volume in asset markets, even when such trading results in high risk and low net returns. Asset prices display patterns of predictability that are difficult to reconcile with rational expectations–based theories of price...

The aim of this paper is to study empirically the existence of precautionary saving in Spain using the micro data provided by the Spanish Survey of Household Finances. Using the panel component of these data I construct a measure of income risk, and use it to test for the strength of...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of discrete choice for labor supply, fertility and transition from tenant to homeowner, to investigate the secular decline in homeownership over the past several decades, wholly attributable to households postponing the purchase of their first...

The rate of time preference (RTP) has been observed to be negatively correlated with incomes, but the mechanism behind this correlation is not yet sufficiently understood. Here, I examine it on the basis of fluid intelligence in an economy in which households behave according to the maximum...

We consider a neoclassical growth model with quasi-hyperbolic discounting under Kantian optimization: each temporal self acts in a way that they would like every future self to act. We introduce the notion of a Kantian policy as an outcome of Kantian optimization in a given class of policies. We...