This paper empirically examines firm owners' gender difference in labor demand. We estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of female ownership on employment of the firm using the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS), provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Because...

Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

This paper examines if ownership control - the share of largest owner in the firm - explains the difference in the adoption of management best practices between Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and rest-of-the-world (ROW). Using a sample of 156,833 firms from 130 countries, of which 25,005 are in SSA,...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general proposition of the relationship between altruism and risk taking. As explained in the body of the paper, we diverge from a result reported in Stark et al. (2022) and provide an expansion and a generalization of a preliminary result reported in...

Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide and a critical public health concern. We examine the hypothesis of suicide contagion within in the workplace, investigating whether exposure to a coworker's suicide increases an individual's suicide risk. Using high-quality administrative data from...

In a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000 ($120,000), we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science...

This paper analyzes the stability and distribution of ambiguity attitudes using a broad population sample. Using high-powered incentives, we collected six waves of data on ambiguity attitudes about financial markets – our main application – and climate change. Estimating a structural...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why risk taking is related to optimism. Using a laboratory experiment, we show that the degree of optimism predicts whether people tend to focus on the positive or negative outcomes of risky decisions. While optimists tend to focus on the good...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...

Received migration research has it that higher relative deprivation strengthens the incentive for people to migrate, and that migration is often a risky enterprise. Relative deprivation has been seen as a push factor in migration, and the level of risk involved in migration has been understood...