We study experimentally when, why, and how people intervene in others’ choices. Choice Architects (CAs) construct opportunity sets containing bundles of time-indexed payments for Choosers. CAs frequently prevent impatient choices despite opportunities to provide advice, believing Choosers benefit. They violate common behavioral welfare criteria by removing options even when all payoffs are dela...

We investigate the relationship between participation in physical activity and self reported happiness in the United States. IV estimates based on data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2005 and 2009 and County Business Patterns indicate that individuals living in a county with greater access to sports facilities are more likely to participate in physical activity and ...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and endeavors to provide an impression of this new, and challenging, development. We study data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to better understand (i) t...

We examine self-control problems — modeled as time-inconsistent, presentbiased preferences—in a model where a person must do an activity exactly once. We emphasize two distinctions: Do activities involve immediate costs or immediate rewards, and are people sophisticated or naive about future self-control problems? Naive people procrastinate immediate-cost activities and preproperate—do too soon...

This paper analyses the determinants of happiness in seven Eastern European transition countries during the early phase of economic transition. The analysis of representative survey data in an ordered logit model shows that those core socio-demographic and economic variables known to be relevant from studies on the US and Western European countries have a similar impact on happiness in Eastern ...

Many safety net programs issue benefits as monthly lump-sum payments. We investigate how the timing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit issuance affects food purchases and incidence transfer. Using scanner data from a large sample grocery stores state time variation in SNAP schedules, we document large, SNAP-induced intramonth cycles expenditures. However, find that reta...

Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. leveraged Facebook advertisements sent over 4 million potential voters encourage citizen reporting of electoral irregularities. also cross-randomized whether candidates were informed about the campaign subset municipalities...

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key parameters. Using tax changes scanner data, we relatively elastic demand. A demographic shift-share identification strategy suggests limited substitution between e-cigarettes cigarettes. field a new survey of public health experts who report that vaping is more harmful than previously believed. In our model’s average Monte Carlo simulatio...

while ignoring income distribution and estimating aggregate demand generally leads to aggregation bias and thus, does not reflect households’ demand properly, yet aggregation bias is rarely considered in empirical demand studies and simply is ignored in most cases. the objective of the present study is to estimate aggregation bias in households’ demand for various types of meats and to evaluate...