Assoc. Prof. Tomáš Jagelka

Living Large or Long: Preference Estimates from Completed-life Stories

In this paper, Tomáš Jagelka, together with co-authors Amitabh Chandra, Erzo F. P. Luttmer, and Joshua Schwartzstein, examines the distributions of preferences for longevity in good health. The value people attach to longevity increases is an important input to policy decisions on health care, the environment, and safety regulations. This value is typically estimated based on compensating differentials for taking on very small risks of death. The authors instead estimate this value by letting people choose between completed life stories in which life-time income and longevity is randomized. They present a battery of tests to gauge whether these hypothetical choices measure underlying preferences. The benefit of the method is that it does not require people to correctly evaluate very small probabilities, yields estimates of the distribution of preferences for longevity in a representative population, and allows for a characterization of heterogeneity in preferences by respondent characteristics.

Mr. Jagelka’s research, supported by the ERC Starting Grant FELICITAS, focuses on advancing our understanding of preferences, skills, and other personal attributes (PSAs), which are fundamental drivers of success in various life domains. The main objectives are: 1) improving the measurement of PSAs by separating latent PSAs from confounders such as effort and cognitive noise, 2) using LLMs as a cost-effective, low-noise complement to human responses, 3) estimating distributions of PSAs and analyzing sources of heterogeneity, 4) relating PSAs to one another to determine the number and nature of independent attributes required to characterize essential human differences, 5) using improved measurements of PSAs in reduced-form and structural labor market, health, and consumer behavior models to clarify the importance of particular PSAs as fundamental drivers of inequality in essential life outcomes, and 6) understanding how PSAs develop and can be boosted by interventions to redress inequalities.

Tomáš Jagelka is an Associate Professor at the University of Bonn. He received his PhD in 2019 from Ecole Polytechnique and is a recurrent visitor to the Economics Department at Dartmouth College, an affiliate of CREST, and an elected Fellow of the Slovak Economic Association. Mr. Jagelka has also undertaken extended visits to the University of Chicago, the Paris School of Economics, the University of Luxembourg, and the University of Vienna. His research has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Political Economy and most recently recognized by the 14th annual Exeter Prize awarded to the most outstanding article published in a refereed journal in 2024 from the following fields: experimental economics, decision theory and behavioral economics.