Individuals in most industrialized countries have to make investment decisions throughout their adult life span to save for their retirement. These decisions substantially affect their living standards in old age. Research on cognitive aging has already demonstrated several changes in cognitive...

Building on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, recent advances in biosemiotics have resulted into a concise framework for the analysis of signs in living systems. This paper explores the potential for economics and shows how biosemiotics can integrate two different research agendas, each...

With the rise of behavioral economics, we have become much more aware that we humans do not make decisions like the rational, solely self-interested beings depicted in neoclassical economics. There is now much greater realism in the description of human decision making. Humans are recognized to...

We investigate some motivations of recycling, using Italian survey data. We find that people declaring an interest in environmental issues or belonging to an environmental association are more likely to recycle. This suggests that the motivations for behaving pro-environmentally have an...

This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration a metabolite of nicotine measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate tax hikes by extracting more nicotine per cigarette. Our study makes two important...

We provide novel evidence on the role of negative social comparisons in population health behaviors by exploiting variation in Miss America and Miss USA beauty pageant winners. We show that there was more front-page newspaper coverage and more pageant-related internet search behavior following a...

We study the identification and estimation of key parameters in a basic model of technology adoption when specifically collected information on subjective beliefs and expectations about the technology’s impact is available. We discuss identification with both non-parametrically and...

This paper examines the impact of maternal employment during a child's first three years and during adolescence on his or her decisions to engage in a range of risky behaviors: smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, using marijuana and other drugs, engaging in sex and committing crimes. Using...

This paper tests whether changes in “incidental emotions” lead to changes in economic choices. Incidental emotions are experienced at the time of an economic decision but are not part of the payoff from a particular choice. As such, the standard economic model predicts that incidental...