Exponential Growth Bias and Financial Literacy The tendency to underestimate the future value of a variable growing at a constant rate, an example of exponential growth bias, has been linked to household financial decision making. We show that exponential growth bias and standard measures of financial literacy are negatively correlated in a representative sample of Swedish adults. Since financi...

This article investigates the association between stock market activity and mental well-being, exploiting the availability of interview dates in the British Household Panel Survey to match changes in the FTSE 100 stock price index to respondents over the period 1991–2008. We present evidence that annual changes in the price index are associated with better mental well-being whilst greater uncer...

In this paper we estimate quadratic food Engel curves with measurement error using the 1994 Ethiopian Urban Household Budget Survey. In sharp contrast to the findings from developed countries, food share is found to increase with expenditure, and only starts to decline after some threshold level of expenditure. We establish the robustness of this inverted-U relationship by estimating a more fle...

Most risk-sharing tests on developing country data are conducted at the level of the village; generally, the full risk-sharing hypothesis is rejected. This paper uses detailed data on all insurance networks within a village in Tanzania; networks are not clustered but largely overlapping. We test whether full risk-sharing occurs within these networks. While village level full-insurance cannot be...

This paper attempts to detect the existence of links in consumption preferences between generations. Preferences for consumption goods may be determined by the preferences of parents (vertical transmission) and/or by preferences arising from the environment (horizontal transmission). We propose an indirect methodology to overcome the lack of data on consumption choices of dynasties, i.e., paren...

About 21% of U.S. college students are overweight. However, aside from the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey (NCHRBS), the prevalence of health-risk behavior among college students has not been well characterized. The objective of this study is to investigate how college student’s body fruit and vegetable intake is affected by (1) demographics, (2) dietary habits, and (3) lifest...

Supersonic jet-isolated porphycene (Pc) and its isotopomers have been studied using the techniques of laser induced fluorescence (LIF) excitation, single vibronic level fluorescence (SVLF) and hole burning spectroscopy, combined with quantum mechanical calculation of geometry and vibrational structures of the ground (S0) and lowest electronically excited (S1) states. Porphycene is a model for c...

We study the spending profile of workers who experience both a positive transitory income shock (lump-sum severance pay) and negative permanent (layoff). Using de-identified expenditure employment data from Brazil, we show that increase at layoff by 35 percent despite experiencing 14 long-term loss. find high sensitivity to cash-on-hand across consumption categories for several sources variatio...

Using non-parametric weak separability tests that are extended to allow for measurement errors in the data, a broad group of UK monetary assets is found to be weakly separable from consumer goods and leisure over the larger part of the nineties. Financial innovations have made assets with substantial interest rate risk (e.g. unit trusts) more liquid and recent developments in monetary aggregati...

This article examines evidence for the private rationality of decisions to choose bottled water using a large, nationally representative sample. Consumers are more likely to believe that bottled water is safer or tastes better if they have had adverse experiences with tap water or live in states with more prevalent violations of EPA water quality standards. Perceptions of superior safety, taste...