Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics Seminar: Tomáš Jagelka, University of Bonn
Abstract
We estimate the Life Year Value Elasticity (LYV-Elasticity), the percentage change in annual earnings during the working life that a person considers equivalent to a 1% change in longevity. Respondents on the Prolific platform choose between "completed life" stories in which earnings and longevity are independently randomized while the narrative is held fixed, a design that elicits preferences over entire life courses and requires no probability judgments. The average LYV-Elasticity is 6.7 (5.4 if matched to characteristics of the US population), stable across survey waves, robust to narrative context, and predicted by an index of longevity-related attitudes and behaviors. Estimated curvature implies that the value of a life year declines with the age at which it occurs, rejecting the constant value per year assumed when a Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) is divided by remaining life expectancy.
About the SBEE Seminar Series
The Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics seminar series brings together a community of economics scholars from three units at the University of Michigan — the School of Information, the Department of Economics and the Ross Business School — whose research aims to broaden the understanding of the social, economic and political consequences of real-life decisions and behaviors.
Top researchers from around the globe come to Michigan to present their work at the SBEE seminar series, exploring the intersection of economics, psychology, computer science and information science.
The seminar series is organized by U-M faculty members Yan Chen (UMSI), Alain Cohn (UMSI), Erin Krupka (UMSI), Stephen Leider (Ross), Christine Exley (Econ), A. Yesim Orhun (Ross), Tanya Rosenblat (UMSI), Karthik Srinivasan (UMSI) and Basit Zafar (Econ). Todd Stuart and Robin Kocher serve as seminar coordinators.
Featured Speaker
Tomáš Jagelka
University of Bonn
Hailing from Bratislava, Slovakia, I have spent much of my adult life abroad. I finished high school in Canada, obtained my B.A. at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, did an exchange at Keble College at the University at Oxford, and received my PhD at École Polytechnique - CREST in France.
I enjoy applied work and have broad research interests. I spent a large portion of my last two years of Ph.D. devising and applying methods to best estimate risk and time preferences and to then map them onto psychological personality traits. I find this work fascinating both because it requires mastering and using state of the art econometrics and because it touches on the very foundations of how individuals make decisions. At the same time, I have been working with QuantCube, a Parisian artificial intelligence startup, to build a large proprietary data set containing the full review history as well as price and rank information since 2015 for over 30 different product categories sold on Amazon. Given the vast amount of data at my disposal, I was able to implement a series of innovative reduced-form econometric analyses to identify a causal link between consumer reviews and smartphone sales. I find this project a particularly good complement to my structural work as it led me to acquire a whole different set of research skills. Finally, I have more complete papers (one already published) in trade and labor which I began prior to commencing my Ph.D.
My private sector experience involves working for two years for Cornerstone Research, an economic consultancy in Boston, MA. As an analyst, I worked on a wide range of cases in finance, company valuation, and intellectual property. I have also interned at MAPP in France where I worked on the Lafarge-Holcim merger and analyzed the nature of competition in the European cement industry. Currently I am collaborating with QuantCube in Paris to identify the impact of consumer reviews on sales.
In my free time I enjoy skiing, ice hockey, and horseback riding.
Contact: [email protected]