The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...

Peer effects in education production functions are predominantly employed as the mean classroom performance. Based on sociological theory and using spatial regression techniques, I introduce social network matrices that correspond to a weighting scheme for peers within the class. In a spatial...

This paper investigates if and how confidence at the individual level changes over the course of a life. We provide age profiles of a novel continuous confidence measure and the probability of overconfidence, conditioning on personality traits (including the Big Five and optimism), economic...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate-level information shocks regarding support for a populist right-wing party on the individual disposition to report a respective political preference in survey interviews. Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its...

Informed decisions are the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, to explore who is good at distinguishing between true and false, and, second, to learn something about mechanisms to debunk false news stories. In an experimental study, subjects were...

Climatic changes largely unfold by means of two types of events: extreme events and gradual long-term changes. This paper highlights how the difference in occurrence probability and (marginal) impact between the two event types leads to structural differences in cognitive processing of event...

We evaluate two variants of a school-based, intensive learning camp for pupils who are assessed 'not ready' for further education after compulsory school, using a stratified cluster randomized trial involving 15,559 pupils in 264 schools in Denmark. Next to training pupils in Danish and...

The consequences of early motherhood for the offspring are severely understudied, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where this phenomenon is prevalent. Using panel data from India, this paper investigates the effect of early maternal age on offspring human capital in terms of...

Women are underrepresented in leadership positions - academia is no exception. Using data on careers of doctoral graduates in Germany, we study gender differences in the decision to stay at university as a postdoctoral researcher and in the intention to become a professor. We find that gender...

We show that parts of the unexplained wage gap in standard Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions result from the neglect of the role played by the family for individual wages. We present a simple model of dual-earner households facing a trade-off regarding whose career to promote and show analytically...