The RFBerlin Brown Bag Seminar is an informal lunchtime meet up where researchers and students present ongoing work and new ideas in a relaxed, discussion-oriented setting. Rooted in the tradition of bringing one’s own lunch in a paper-brown bag, it offers space for open exchange and constructive feedback.
Tomáš Jagelka is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, affiliated with the Institute for Applied Microeconomics and the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence, and a recurrent Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. His research combines applied microeconometrics with structural, experimental, and behavioural methods to study questions in labour and health economics. Much of his current work, including his ERC-funded FELICITAS project, examines the skills, preferences, and personal attributes that shape opportunity and a good life, and how policy can help equalize them.
Event Topic:
Separating Preferences, Skills, and other Latent Personal Attributes from Endogenous Effort and Cognitive Noise
joint with Christian Belzil (Ecole Polytechnique & ENSAE)
We develop a micro-founded framework to account for individuals’ effort and cognitive noise which confound estimates of preferences based on observed behavior. Using a large-scale experimental dataset we find that observed decision noise responds to the costs and benefits of exerting effort on individual choice tasks as predicted by our model. We estimate that failure to properly account for decision errors due to (rational) inattention on a more complex, but commonly used, task design biases estimates of risk aversion by 50% for the median individual. Effort propensities recovered from preference elicitation tasks generalize to other settings and predict performance on an OECD-sponsored achievement test used to make international comparisons.
Event Details:
Participation in the seminar is limited to RFBerlin members and researchers from affiliated institutions. External researchers who are interested in attending are kindly asked to contact us under [email protected]
