Economic Decision-Making Skill Predicts Income in Two Countries

Corresponding author email: david deming@harvard.edu. This paper subsumes some prior results from Deming (2021). We thank the Sloan Foundation for supporting this research under the "Cognitive Economics at Work” grant. Deming and Weidmann gratefully acknowledge funding from Schmidt Futures for the Harvard Skills Lab. Caplin and Leth-Petersen thank the NOMIS Foundation for supporting this research under the Firm and Worker Adaptation to Unexpected Events grant and the Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI), a center of excellence at the University of Copenhagen financed by grant DNRF134 from the Danish National Research Foundation. We thank Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Max Bazerman, Alex Frankel, Jon Gruber, Nathan Hendren, Tomas Jagelka, Emir Kamenica, Jenn Lerner, Jim Poterba, Josh Schwartzstein, Jesse Shapiro, Michael Woodford, and seminar participants at University of Maryland, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT, Harvard Business School, Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago - Booth, Vanderbilt, and the NBER Organizational Economics meetings for insightful comments. We also thank Josh Benhamou for outstanding technical work on the experimental platform. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
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• September 7, 2023