We investigate the importance of subjective expectations of returns to and effort costs of the two main investments that mothers make in newborns: breastfeeding and stimulation. We find heterogeneity across mothers in expected effort costs and expected returns for outcomes in the cognitive,...

In this paper we examine the impact of a tailored health warning on health outcomes. We exploit the design of a household panel survey that provided feedback to participants on their blood-pressure levels as a quasi-experiment. We find that many participants who were told their blood-pressure...

Many decisions are made under uncertainty, and individuals are likely to form subjective expectations about the probabilities of events that are relevant to their decisions. I review here a recent and growing literature that uses probabilistic expectations elicited from survey respondents in...

The majority of economic decisions taken by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their expectations of future outcomes. Understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health, education, finance, migration,...

This study analyzes the extent to which an individual’s survival expectations influence his or her decision to claim social security benefits at an early age. We find that subjective survival probabilities capture meaningful behavioral responses to incentives for early Social Security claiming...

We examine the consequences of prosecuting people who are human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive and expose others to the infection. We show that the effect of such prosecutions on the spread of HIV is a priori ambiguous. The prosecutions deter unsafe sex. However, they also create...

This paper investigates how attitudes toward the United States are affected by the provision of information. We use an experimentally generated panel of attitudes, obtained by providing urban Pakistanis with fact-based statements describing the United States in either a positive or negative...