Thomas Epper

We examine whether individual preferences predict higher-education choices. According to standard human capital theory, differences in individuals’ time and risk preferences lead to differences in educational investments. Testing this hypothesis is challenging, as it requires measuring individuals’ preferences, doing so before they make educational investments, and subsequently observing their educational choices. We combine incentivized, experimentally elicited measures of time and risk preferences for a large, representative sample of 18- to 19-y-old Danes with administrative data on subsequent higher-education choices, program-specific earnings trajectories, prior school performance, and family background. In line with theory, we find that more patient individuals choose longer education programs and programs with steeper early-career earnings profiles, while more risk-averse individuals select programs with lower earnings dispersion and reduced downside risk. These relationships remain strong after controlling for cognitive ability, prior academic performance, and family background. Our findings suggest that preferences have a substantial impact on real-world educational investments and have implications for educational sorting.

Understanding the drivers of public support for climate policies is crucial for designing socially feasible policy packages. However, most large-scale public opinion surveys focus primarily on mitigation policies. Here, we combine two representative survey waves from nine European countries (n = 27,910) to directly compare determinants of public support for climate change mitigation versus adaptation measures. We find that respondents support both mitigation and adaptation as policy objectives, but support specific adaptation policies slightly more than specific mitigation measures. Moreover, support for the two is shaped by a different composition of individual characteristics and policy evaluations. While adaptation support is driven primarily by perceived effectiveness, mitigation support is mostly driven by cost salience and politicisation. Our results suggest a stark difference in how Europeans incorporate the costs and benefits of mitigation versus adaptation policies into their support, and suggest avenues for remedying this imbalance.

The feasibility of implementing climate policies relies on citizen support. While recent efforts have focused on shifting the attitudes of policy opponents, little is known about the middle group who neither reflexively endorse nor reject mitigation measures. Here, using a survey of climate policy preferences across 13 EU countries (n = 19,328) in 2024, we identify the ‘conditionals’—a crucial faction of moderates whose support shifts across 15 climate measures— and examine the factors influencing their choices and quantify their electoral impact. Conditionals constitute 33% of Europeans who are active voters for the dominant centrist and centre-right parties. The preferences of conditionals hinge upon specific policy instruments and the perceived cost–benefit balances but less on fixed ideology or demographics. The potential shift of conditionals plays a vital role in shaping overall patterns of public policy support and electoral outcomes. Our findings emphasize the visible benefits of strategic engagement with conditionals for climate policy success.

The European Union (EU) has adopted ambitious climate policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. While technical, economic, and political feasibility have been widely analyzed, far less is known about a critical enabling factor: whether key societal actors perceive these targets as credible and achievable. In this study, we elicit probabilistic beliefs about future EU emission reductions from a sample of citizens designed to be representative across 12 EU member states and compare them with the expectations of climate policymakers and experts. Our findings reveal that all three groups anticipate substantial progress compared to current levels. At the same time, citizens are more skeptical about achieving the target and substantially more uncertain than elites, expecting, on average, a 43% reduction by 2030 compared to the EU’s 55% reference. Moreover, we identify a notable misalignment: elites tend to systematically underestimate public skepticism. This gap underscores the need to improve policy communication, directly address citizens’ concerns, and foster a shared understanding to enhance the perceived credibility and political sustainability of the EU’s climate goals.

In this registered report, we investigate (i) whether incentives affect subjects' willingness to pay to increase, and to decrease the payoff of others, (ii) whether they affect the distribution of social preference types, and (iii) whether they affect the strength and the precision of individuals' structurally estimated social preference parameters. Using an online experiment with a general population sample, we show that the use of monetary incentives, as well as the size of the stakes, have little impact on subjects' modal choices (descriptive analysis), as well as for the distribution of qualitatively distinct preference types in the population (clustering analysis). However, monetary incentives affect quantitative measures of the strength and the precision of social preferences. Indeed, a structural analysis reveals that the preference elicitation with merely hypothetical stakes leads to an overestimation and a less precise measurement of social preferences. Together, these results highlight that incentivizing the elicitation of social preferences is most useful when interested in quantitative estimates.For researchers interested in identifying merely qualitative preferences types, however, hypothetical stakes might suffice.

Significance: Who commits crime? Theoretically, risk-tolerant and impatient people are more likely to commit crime because they care less about the risks of apprehension and punishment. By linking experimental data on risk tolerance and impatience of young men to administrative crime records, we find empirical support for this hypothesis. For example, crime rates are 8 to 10 percentage points higher for the most risk-tolerant people compared to the most risk averse. A theoretical implication is that those who are most prone to commit crime are also those who are least responsive to stricter law enforcement. Risk tolerance and impatience significantly predict property crime, while self-control is a stronger predictor of crimes of passion (violent, drug, and sexual offenses).