UC San Diego

Time preferences, the willingness of decision makers to substitute intertemporally, are not shared or consistent values. They vary across populations, households, individuals and mindsets. Understanding the systematic variability of time preferences is crucial for designing effective economic policy, especially in light of the modern focus on nonstandard models of discounting. This dissertation features a real-world data project that highlights the important interaction between individual differences in preferences and economic policy, a laboratory experiment that showcases the sensitivity of an individual's time preferences to environmental factors and a laboratory experiment that validates a field-ready technique for estimating an individual's time preferences that is already being implemented by many other researchers