We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This...

Being the leader in a group often involves making risky decisions that affect the payoffs of all members, and the decision to take this responsibility in a group is endogenous in many contexts. In this paper, we experimentally study: (1) the willingness of men and women to make risky decisions...

We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the group leader’s decision of how much risk to take, we study...

This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the...

It has been argued that rare economic disasters can explain most asset pricing puzzles. If this is the case, perceived risk associated with a disaster in stock markets should be revealed in household portfolios. That is, the framework that solves these pricing puzzles should also generate...

This paper is an attempt to answer the long standing question of whether more affluent households save a larger fraction of their income. The major difficulty in empirically assessing the relationship between incomes and saving rates is to construct a credible proxy for long-run income –...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

First order conditions from the dynamic optimization problems of consumers and firms are important tools in empirical macroeconomics. When estimated on micro-data these equations are typically linearized so standard IV or GMM methods can be employed to deal with the measurement error that is...

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. We were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and January 2007. Access to such information is rare....