We study empirically whether there is scope for parents to shape the economic preferences and attitudes of their children through purposeful investments. We exploit information on the risk and trust attitudes of parents and their children, as well as rich information about parental efforts in...

This story describes the circumstances that led to all five of us starting as editors at the same time, the unexpected things we have found, the unanticipated reactions we have encountered, how we worked as an editorial team, the central role of the editorial office manager, how we managed to...

Abschlussorientierte Weiterbildungen können für Geringqualifizierte ein probates Mittel sein, um ihre Beschäftigungs- und Verdienstmöglichkeiten in einer sich stetig wandelnden Arbeitswelt zu verbessern. Häufig werden aber finanzielle Gründe als Hinderungsgrund genannt, wenn es um...

Erklärtes Ziel der Politik ist es, dass mehr Geringqualifizierte einen Berufsabschluss erwerben. Daher soll die Teilnahme an geförderten berufsabschlussbezogenen Weiterbildungen attraktiver werden. Der Gesetzentwurf zur Einführung eines Bürgergeldes sieht vor, die aktuelle...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why risk taking is related to optimism. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that the degree of optimism predicts whether people tend to focus on the positive or negative outcomes of risky decisions. While optimists tend to focus on the good...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...

We conduct a laboratory experiment among male participants to investigate whether rewarding schemes that depend on work performance – in particular, tournament incentives – induce more stress than schemes that are independent of performance - fixed payment scheme. Stress is measured over the...

Social science research has stressed the important role of religion in sustaining cooperation among non-kin. We contribute to this literature with a large-scale empirical study documenting the relationship between religion and cooperation. We analyze newly available, experimentally validated,...

Measures based on self-assessments, which are increasingly important in empirical economic research, are plagued by measurement error. This paper presents the first attempt at measuring both revealed and self-reported reliability of individuals' answers on self-reports of latent characteristics....

Working time autonomy is often accompanied by output-based incentives to counterbalance the loss of monitoring that comes with granting autonomy. However, in such settings, overprovision of effort could arise if workers are uncertain whether their performance suffices to secure the output-based...