Abstract: When it comes to economic reforms in developing countries, many economists agree on broad objectives (such as fostering outward orientation). Broad objectives, however, can be pursued in many di¤erent ways, and policy experimentation is often indispensable for learning which...

There are many pathways explaining the relationship between socioeconomic status and health; one possibility is that some normally unobservable characteristic causes people to invest both in their financial well-being and their health. Here we consider the possibility that the decision making...

When it comes to estimating the benefits of long-term savings, many people rely on their intuition. Focusing on the domain of retirement savings, we use a randomized experiment to explore people’s intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to estimate future...

The modern world is complex and difficult to understand for voters, who may hold beliefs that are at variance with reality. Politicians face incentives to pander to voters' beliefs to get reelected. We analyze the welfare effects of this pandering and show that it entails both costs and...

This paper develops a new life cycle model that aims to describe the savings and asset allocation choices of boundedly rational agents. In this model, agents make forward-looking decisions without the requirement of anticipating their actual future decisions. Instead, agents pursue two simple...

Many economists and policy-makers argue that households do not save enough to maintain an adequate standard of living during retirement. However, there is no consensus on the answer to the underlying question what this standard should be, despite the fact that it is crucial for the design of...

This paper develops a new life cycle model that aims to describe the savings and asset allocation decisions of boundedly rational agents. The paper’s main theoretical contribution is the provision of a simple, tractable and parsimonious framework within which agents make forward looking...

A canonical but untested assumption in economics is that choices are determined only by preferences and budget constraints, but not by how people approach decision making. In particular, it is believed that people behave “as if they optimized”, even if they do not engage in any formal...