Department of Economics, Washington University in St Louis


 Patrick McAlvanah


Campus Box 1208
Department of Economics
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

E-mail:  pmcalvanah@wustl.edu
Phone:  314-387-0048

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis and am on the job market in the fall of '07.  My primary research fields are Applied Microeconomics, Behavioral Economics, and Experimental Economics.   My CV and the latest versions of my working papers can be accessed below.
        Home        CV        Job Market Paper        Research        Teaching           

Working papers:

Subadditivity, Patience, and Utility: The Effects of Dividing Time Intervals  (Job Market Paper)
Previous work has demonstrated that time discounting is subadditive; individuals are more impatient when a delay is divided into sub-intervals.  This paper demonstrates that subdivision affects both components of intertemporal choice, the utility function as well as the intertemporal discount function.  In my first experiment, I demonstrate that differential concavity of utility for gains and convexity for losses implies that the discounting of losses is even more subadditive than the discounting of gains.  Individuals display even more relative impatience over divided time intervals for negative amounts of money than for positive amounts of money.  My second experiment utilizes alternative elicitation methods, which impose an intertemporal status quo, to highlight these utility effects.  Subadditivity is stronger when delaying an early gain than for hastening a later gain.  The reverse pattern holds for losses; discounting is more subadditive when hastening a later loss than for delaying an earlier loss.

Are People More Risk-Taking in the Presence of the Opposite Sex?  Under submission.
This paper investigates whether exposure to the opposite sex induces greater risk-taking in both males and females using a probability discounting procedure with hypothetical monetary rewards.  Experimental subjects viewed pictures of opposite sex faces; control subjects viewed pictures of cars.  Both males and females viewing opposite sex photos displayed a significant increase in risk tolerance, whereas the control subjects exhibited no significant change. Surprisingly, the attractiveness of the photo had no effect; subjects viewing photographs of attractive opposite sex persons displayed similar results as those viewing photographs of unattractive people.

Quasi-hyperbolic is Quasi-correct: Considerations for Modeling Temporal Discounting with the Quasi-Hyperbolic Function  (with Leonard Green and Joel Myerson)
Recent work has utilized a quasi-hyperbolic function, a tractable simplification of a hyperbolic function, to model time-inconsistent preferences.  This essay explores the theoretical and empirical implications of employing the quasi-hyperbolic simplification as opposed to a continuous hyperbolic function.  We find that the quasi-hyperbolic function fits data remarkably well, provided that the optimal break point is chosen.  The quasi-hyperbolic function suffers a few potential theoretical weaknesses, such as only permitting preference reversals at one specific time period.  However, for a wide variety of cases, the quasi-hyperbolic and true hyperbolic functions will be observationally equivalent.


Work in progress:

 Implications of Subadditivity for the Temporal Discount Function

 Two Wrongs Can Make a Right: Opposite Biases Can Approximate Rationality (with John Nye)

A Common Approach to the Gain/Loss Asymmetry, Delay/Speed-Up Asymmetry, and Magnitude Effect

Temporal Inconsistency and the Magnitude Effect

Last Updated: September 2007