This study investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic outcomes. We use a Swedish longitudinal data set that links information from a large survey on children's time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Our results indicate a substantial adverse relationship between high discount rates and school performance, health, labour supply and lifetime income. Males and high-ability children gain significantly more from being future oriented. These discrepancies are largest regarding outcomes later in life. We also show that the relationship between time preferences and long-run outcomes operates through early human capital investments.Every day people make decisions that involve balancing costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. Such choices include whether or not to drop out of school, search for a new job or start saving. Intertemporal decision-making has been a cornerstone in many economic models since Samuelson (1937), and a salient feature in human capital theory, where the notion is that people with high discount rates invest less in their future than people who are more future oriented (Mincer, 1958;Becker, 1964). As the full returns to many human capital investments are not revealed until some time later, it is remarkable that there are few empirical studies which link time preferences to long-term outcomes. 1 This lacuna is especially evident regarding investments made early in life. Needless to say, childhood represents a critical period when many important investments are made with potentially life-long consequences. With a small number of exceptions (Mischel et al., 1989;Cadena and Keys, 2011;Moffitt et al., 2011), the existing evidence on the connection between time preferences and real-world outcomes is cross-sectional in nature and focuses on the adult population.This study investigates the relationship between time preferences during childhood and long-run social and economic outcomes. We use a Swedish longitudinal data set that links survey-based information on 11,907 children's time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Time preferences are measured through a questionnaire in which children are asked to rate the extent to which they prefer SEK 900 (US$ 138) today over SEK 9,000 (US$ 1,380) in five years. 2 We

BackgroundHow have suicide rates responded to the marked increase in unemployment spurred by the Great Recession? Our paper puts this issue into a wider perspective by assessing (1) whether the unemployment-suicide link is modified by the degree of unemployment protection, and (2) whether the effect on suicide of the present crisis differs from the effects of previous economic downturns.MethodsWe analysed the unemployment-suicide link using time-series data for 30 countries spanning the period 1960–2012. Separate fixed-effects models were estimated for each of five welfare state regimes with different levels of unemployment protection (Eastern, Southern, Anglo-Saxon, Bismarckian and Scandinavian). We included an interaction term to capture the possible excess effect of unemployment during the Great Recession.ResultsThe largest unemployment increases occurred in the welfare state regimes with the least generous unemployment protection. The unemployment effect on male suicides was statistically significant in all welfare regimes, except the Scandinavian one. The effect on female suicides was significant only in the eastern European country group. There was a significant gradient in the effects, being stronger the less generous the unemployment protection. The interaction term capturing the possible excess effect of unemployment during the financial crisis was not significant.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the more generous the unemployment protection the weaker the detrimental impact on suicide of the increasing unemployment during the Great Recession.

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee placement policy that provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subject's ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of high-educated in the assigned neighborhood raises compulsory school GPA by 0.8 percentile ranks. Particularly for disadvantaged groups, there are also long-run effects on educational attainment. (JEL I21, J15, R23)