We examine whether credit contributes to business cycle fluctuations by dirctly affecting consumption rather than through the new well understood investment channel.

This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...

This article provides an overview of the literature on the psychological value of time. It discusses various determinants of the discount rate and the possibility of hyperbolic discounting. The historical approach helps us to trace the origins of the concept of psychological value of time. This...

The aim of this paper is to build the stated preference method into the social discount rate methodology. The first part of the paper presents the results of a survey about stated time preferences through pair-choice decision situations for various topics and time horizons. It is assumed that...

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying intertemporal preference for symmetric gains and losses in certain conditions, by asking subjects to choose between two gains or two losses available at different points in time. Our data...

According to recent evidence (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2002), the traditional Discounted Utility model (Samuelson, 1937) has a limited ability to describe realistic models of behaviour and indeed there are several documented empirical regularities that seem to contradict this...

"Hyperbolic discount functions are characterized by a relatively high discount rate over short horizons and a relatively low discount rate over long horizons" (Laibson 1997).We suggest two cognitive procedures where individuals perceive future utility as decreasing at a decreasing rate as a...

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people's emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a large panel data set, I identify happiness,...

We provide new evidence of worker-firm matching based on preferences, attitudes and personality traits using new, representative matched employer-employee data from Germany. Time-constant firm characteristics explain a significant proportion of total variance in a series of outcome variables...