Overconfidence over the lifespan: Evidence from Germany

Tim Friehe and Markus Pannenberg

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2019, vol. 74, issue C

Abstract: This paper investigates if and how overconfidence at the individual level changes over the course of a life. We provide age profiles of a novel continuous overconfidence measure and the probability of being overconfident, conditioning on personality traits (including the Big 5 and optimism), economic preferences, cognitive ability, and the individual’s socio-economic status. Our empirical work relies on representative panel data sets from Germany, and individuals’ both self-assessed and actual percentile in the monthly gross wage distribution are incorporated in our measure of overconfidence. We find that both the level of relative placement and the overplacement probability increase with age up to one's fifties.

Keywords: Confidence; Age; Wage distribution; Germany; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D91 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487019300479
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:74:y:2019:i:c:s0167487019300479

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2019.102207

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().