A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range of real-world behaviors,...

The wage effect of job-education vertical mismatch (i.e. overeducation) has only recently been investigated in the case of Ph.D. holders. The existing contributions rely on OLS estimates that allow measuring the average effect of being mismatched at the mean of the conditional wages...

We investigate how childhood cognitive skills affect strategic sophistication and adult outcomes. In particular, we emphasize the importance of childhood theory-of-mind as a cognitive skill. We collected experimental data from more than seven hundred children in a variety of strategic...

We experimentally study how people form predictive models of simple data generating processes (DGPs), by showing subjects data sets and asking them to predict future outputs. We find that subjects: (i) often fail to predict in this task, indicating a failure to form a model, (ii) often cannot...

Both economists and psychologists are interested in understanding decision making under uncertainty. Yet, they rely on different concepts to analyse human behaviour: Economists use economic preference parameters rooted in utility theory, while psychologists use personality traits to describe...

Traditionally, economic models have attributed procrastination to present bias. However, procrastination may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding motivated, overly optimistic beliefs about the workload they need to complete. This study provides a rigorous...

Procrastination is often attributed to time-inconsistent preferences but may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding optimistic beliefs about their future effort costs. This study provides a rigorous empirical test for this notion of ‘motivated procrastination’....

Differences in cognitive sophistication and effort are at the root of behavioral heterogeneity in economics. To explain this heterogeneity, behavioral models assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. A fundamental problem with this approach is that observing a choice does not...

By running a battery of incentivized and non-incentivized experiments with fund managers from four countries in the European Union, we investigate the impact of fund managers' cognitive skills and economic preferences on the dynamics of the mutual funds they manage. First, we find that fund...

Payments and discounts incentivize participation in many transactions about which people know little, but can learn more --- payments for medical trial participation, signing bonuses for job applicants, or price rebates on consumer durables. Who opts into the transaction when given such...