Episode 26: Hans van Kippersluis on why we skip workouts

This episode’s guest is Professor Hans van Kippersluis from Erasmus School of Economics. He discusses his working paper “Skipping your workout, again? Measuring and understanding time inconsistency in physical activity”, co-authored with Diarmaid Ó Ceallaigh and Kirsten Rohde. The paper studies time inconsistency in physical activity using survey data from the Dutch Lifelines cohort. They find that participants not only overestimate but also underestimate their future exercise. We talk about why present bias may not be the only explanation for the misalignment between intentions and behaviour, and how it may not be a stable personality trait. Hans also explains the use of choice matching to incentivise honest survey responses. Finally, we discuss how to write well-structured papers, the use of econometric methods for causal inference, and how Hans keeps up with developments in the econometrics literature.

Guest: Hans van Kippersluis, Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus School of Economics
Hosts: Fanny Tallgren & Prithviraj Basu Mallik

Timestamps:

(00:23) Introduction to Professor Hans and his research journey
(03:43) Motivation for the study on physical activity and time inconsistency
(08:21) Choice matching method to incentivise honest survey responses
(13:33) Key findings of the paper
(30:40) How to write a good economics paper
(39:05) Causal inference and staying up to date with econometrics