Risk attitudes play a pivotal role to understand economic decision‐making, and several measures are used to elicit them in the lab and survey them in the field. We provide a literature review on the most commonly used risk elicitation methods by Holt and Laury (HL) and the Investment Game (IG)...

Utilizing the longitudinal SOEP data representative of the German population, we find that mental health shocks significantly decrease the willingness to take risks. We also find that mental health improvements increase the willingness to take risks significantly. Our findings are relevant for...

We analyze insurance demand when insurable losses come with an uninsurable zero‐mean background risk that increases in the loss size. If the individual is risk vulnerable, loss‐dependent background risk triggers a precautionary insurance motive and increases optimal insurance demand....

This paper empirically assesses the selection effects and determinants of the demand for supple-mental health insurance that covers hospital and dental benefits in Germany. Our representative dataset provides doctor-diagnosed indicators of the individual's health status, risk attitude, demand...

This paper studies insurance demand for individuals with limited financial literacy. We propose uncertainty about insurance payouts, resulting from contract complexity, as a novel channel that affects decision-making of financially illiterate individuals. Then, a trade-off between second-order...

Economic decisions frequently entail choices in the presence of risk. Decisions to purchase insurance, to save, to invest, and to pursue an education are all choices that may involve some degree of risk, just to name a few. We analyze the impact of changes in family structure on individuals'...

Reinsurance is a transaction insurance firms use to hedge risk. Existing studies have only investigated the demand for reinsurance. Thus, we do not have direct evidence on whether the use of reinsurance creates value. Our study provides this evidence. We find a positive relation between the use...

We present subjects with an incentivized standard portfolio problem where the risky asset has a negative expected return. Individuals scoring high in the three dark triad personality traits Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy invest approximately 20% more into the risky asset. Out of...

The current study uses the German Socio Economic Panel to examine how the financial crisis of 2008-2010 impacted individuals' risk attitude. We find substantial changes in risk attitudes associated with the financial crisis which supports countercyclical risk aversion. We find that managers who...