Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Economics, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
C. Mónica Capra
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Joshua Tasoff
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Thomas J. Kniesner
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2026 Kichang Kim
Subject Categories
Economics
Abstract
This dissertation investigates economic preferences as a central determinant of decision-making, paying particular attention to how such preferences are formed, how they are associated with subjective well-being, and how they can be activated through targeted intervention. Chapter 1 conducts field experiments with 196 worker-parent pairs from two companies in China and South Korea and explores factors that affect the similarity of risk preferences between parents and their offspring. In Chinese data, we show more similar risk preferences between parents and their offspring when there are higher levels of parental involvement and financial parenting. In contrast, in the Korean data, a more demanding parenting style contributes to intergenerational transmission. These effects are mainly captured by the intergenerational transmission from Chinese mothers to their offspring and from Korean fathers to their offspring. In addition, we find that in our study, the transmission of same gender greatly contributes to the intergenerational transmission, and the risk preferences of Chinese workers and their parents are more similar than those of Korean workers and their parents. We also discuss potential differences in the intergenerational transmission of risk preferences between China and Korea and Western countries. Our study provides a better understanding of the formation of risk preferences in individuals. Chapter 2 explores the association between six economic preferences and three dimensions of subjective well-being in Australia. Using a representative sample of 1,002 respondents from the 2012 Global Preferences Survey matched to the 2012 Gallup World Poll, this study estimates ordered logit models for life evaluation and fractional logit models for positive and negative experience. The results show that risk preference and trust are the most robust correlates across all three dimensions of well-being, while patience is not significantly associated with any outcome. More selective associations appear for social preferences, with altruism positively related to positive experience, negative reciprocity negatively related to life evaluation, and positive reciprocity positively related to negative experience. The paper contributes a descriptive benchmark within country on the joint association between behavioral heterogeneity and multi-dimensional subjective well-being in a common institutional setting. Chapter 3 considers that a short-term workplace intervention can induce meaningful improvements in retirement savings behavior. To address this question, this chapter employs a randomized field experiment conducted in Korea and finds that even a brief, scalable educational intervention significantly increases the intention of employees to engage in retirement savings. This effect is especially pronounced among workers who had not previously enrolled in private retirement plans. The intervention operates by activating behavioral responses: by increasing the salience of retirement savings and incorporating a pledge-based commitment device, it encourages individuals to act immediately. These findings indicate that low-cost, scalable workplace interventions can be an effective means of reducing behavioral frictions, particularly limited attention and inertia, in retirement savings decisions.
ISBN
9798244887501
Recommended Citation
Kim, Kichang. (2026). Three Essays on Behavioral Economics. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 1109. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1109.
