We study how cognitive abilities correlate with behavioral choices by collecting evidence from almost 1, 200 subjects across eight experimental projects concerning a wide variety of tasks, including some classic risk and social preference elicitation protocols. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to all our experimental subjects, which makes our dataset one of the largest in the literature. We partition our subject pool into three groups depending on their CRT performance. Reflective subjects are those answering at least two of the three CRT questions correctly. Impulsive subjects are those who are unable to suppress the instinctive impulse to follow the intuitive -although incorrect-answer in at least two 2 questions. The remaining subjects form a residual group. We find that females score significantly less than males in the CRT and that, in their wrong answers, impulsive ones are observed more frequently. The 2D-4D ratio, which is higher for females, is correlated negatively with subjects' CRT score. We also find that differences in risk attitudes across CRT groups crucially depend on the elicitation task. Finally, impulsive subjects have higher social (inequity-averse) concerns, while reflective subjects are more likely to satisfy basic consistency requirements in lottery choices. JEL Classification: C91, D81, J16

We study how the ratio between the length of the second and fourth digit (2D:4D) correlates with choices in social and risk preferences elicitation tasks by building a large dataset from five experimental projects with more than 800 subjects. Our results confirm the recent literature that downplays the link between 2D:4D and many domains of economic interest, such as social and risk preferences. As for the former, we find that social preferences are significantly lower when 2D:4D is above the median value only for subjects with low cognitive ability. As for the latter, we find that a high 2D:4D is not correlated with the frequency of subjects' risky choices.

Evidence showing that on average left-handed (L), who are 10% in a population, tend to earn less than others is solely based on survey data. This paper is the first to test the relationship between handedness and earnings experimentally and also to assess whether the mechanism underlying it is predominantly cognitive or psychological. Data on 432 undergraduate students show that L do not obtain significantly different payoffs, a proxy for earnings, in a stylised labour market with multiple principals and agents. Similarly, scores in the Cognitive Reflection Test are not significantly different. Data on personality, measured using the Big Five test, show, instead, that L are significantly more agreeable and L females more extroverted. In addition, earnings significantly vary with personality only for L, increasing with extraversion and decreasing with neuroticism. Overall, our results fail to reject the null hypothesis that earnings do not differ by handedness and suggest differences in personality as a novel mechanism to rationalise L’s behaviour.

In this paper we study whether substituting family inputs with school resources in an academically oriented environment has an impact on achievement in high-stakes national examinations. We use administrative data for England to estimate the effect of attending a selective boarding school that admits an unusually high share of pupils with low socio-economic status on attainment at the end of compulsory education. By using propensity score matching we obtain comparable control groups in selective non-boarding schools. Our main finding is that the probability of being in the top decile of achievement in the exams increases by about 18 percentage points compared to 59% for controls.