We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals' life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their...

We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals' life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their...

Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts,...

Exponential-growth bias is the tendency to neglect the compounding of interest. The economics literature has used the fact that a biased agent in many circumstances will underestimate the value of assets that grow according to compound interest. We show that the opposite can also be true. It is...

I use data from an online financial service to show that many consumers fail to stick to their self-set debt paydown plans, and argue that this behavior is best explained by present bias. Each user's sensitivity of consumption spending to paycheck receipt proxies for his short-run impatience. I...

We explore the relationship between household finances and personality traits from an empirical perspective. Specifically, using individual level data drawn from the British Household Panel Survey, we analyse the influence of personality traits on financial decision-making at the individual...

This paper examines heterogeneity in the responsiveness to default options in a large state retirement plan, focusing on individuals' decision-making approaches as well as their economic and demographic characteristics. Using a survey of plan participants, we find that procrastination and the...

This research project evaluates the extent of heterogeneity in time discounting among elderly Americans, as well as its role in explaining older peoples' key behaviors. We first show how older Americans evaluate simple (hypothetical) intertemporal choices in which payments now are compared with...

This paper provides new evidence on native-migrant differences in financial behavior by analyzing the role of noncognitive and cognitive skills. We make use of data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) which is a longitudinal household survey of the older U.S. population containing...