PhD defence E.A.W. (Eric) Slob

Over the past decades, it has been convincingly shown that all human traits (including preferences) are heritable. The use of insights from genetics to increase our understanding of how economic agents make their choices is called “genoeconomics”. In this thesis, I develop and compare methods to foster the further emergence of the field of genoeconomics and I perform genetically informed empirical analyses to better understand smoking behaviour, entrepreneurship, and the structure of the brain. The present thesis contributes to the realization of these promises by analyzing how genes can be used as instrumental variables, investigating how genes help to explain why individuals engage in entrepreneurship and why individuals make different choices in response to an increase in tobacco excise taxes, and developing a method to better understand the shared genetic architecture of economic behaviour and the human brain.

Due to corona, the PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall or in the Professor Andries Querido Room. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.