Abstract Patience and risk-taking—two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making—are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute international skill differences, we combine Programme for International Student Assessment tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find opposing effects of patience (positive) risk-taking (negative) toge...

Vaccination is a pressing public health issue. We hypothesize that impatience (discounting future benefits of current actions) leads to lower vaccination rates and worse attitudes toward vaccines. In preregistered individual-level Study 1 ( N = 2,614), we document positive quantitatively small association (standardized coefficient 0.06) between patience 2 76), national-level accounts for 21% th...

We present evidence that intrinsic demand for information about the future is increasing in expected future consumption utility. In the first experiment, subjects may resolve a lottery now or later. The information is useless for decision making but the larger the reward, the more likely subjects are to pay to resolve the lottery early. In the second experiment subjects may pay to avoid being t...