We study the effect of people’s temporal values (habits of attending to past or future events) on their health, labour market performance and happiness. Participants’(N=1177) data were initially collected in 2016 and followed in 2020-2021. We find that habitually more attending to the future negatively correlates to diseases (heart attack; high cholesterol; diabetes; high-blood pressure), but positively associates with health-related behaviour (eating vegetables and fruit; less smoking), health status (e.g., healthy weight; long life expectancy), income, hourly wages, financial satisfaction and happiness. Furthermore, such temporal values predict participants’ future situation of these aspects in 2020-2021, even after controlling for the 2016 baseline situation, IQ, self-control, patience, risk aversion and demographic information. We propose a temporal values and well-being hypothesis, suggesting that individuals’ temporal values can predict their concurrent and longitudinal all-around well-being. Our findings have strong implications for theories of time perception, and for a better understanding of factors that influence people’s health, income, and happiness.

We study pension planning and financial wealth of natives and immigrants (N=1177) in the Netherlands, in relation to their temporal values (past/future-focused), financial knowledge, IQ, and other individual characteristics. We find that, compared to natives, immigrants are less financially literate and rely more on the government for their retirement income, but are more future-focused and think more about their retirement. Second, controlling for financial knowledge, IQ, saving intention, self-control and demographic factors, temporal values help to predict many aspects of pension planning: how much people think about retirement, their desired retirement age, whether they develop a plan to save for retirement, perceived saving adequacy, and home ownership. Furthermore, temporal values predict savings, risky assets and financial wealth in 2016 and 2020, even after controlling for the financial situation in 2016. Our results have strong implications for policies related to pension communication and contribute to the theory on relationships between economic decisions, time and cognition.

We study the effect of Dutch proficiency on immigrants’ labour market performance, savings and financial wealth in the Netherlands. Different from past research, we had participants (N=659) take a language proficiency test apart from self-reported assessments, and measured participants’ IQ, patience, saving intention, risk aversion, self-control, temporal focus, etc. to better control for individual characteristics. Immigrants’ labour market performance and financial wealth were initially surveyed in 2016, and then again in 2020-2021. We find that Dutch proficiency affects immigrants’ earnings (employment probabilities; income; hourly wages) in 2016 and predicts participants’ earnings in 2021 even after controlling for the baseline in 2016, individual characteristics and demographic information. Furthermore, the results for the first time reveal that language proficiency can also predict immigrants’ current and future savings and financial wealth. Importantly, using an instrumental variables approach we show that language proficiency has a causal effect. Our findings have important theoretical and policy implications.