We provide empirical evidence that visceral factors affect financial risk taking by showing that exposure to mass shootings alters mutual fund managers' risk taking decisions. Funds that are exposed to mass shootings subsequently decrease risk relative to their peers. The effect that we document...

Prospect theory has changed the way economists think about decision making under uncertainty – yet after so many years there have been few applications of the theory and those appearing mostly in finance. One of the barriers to applying the prospect theory is that it is not designed to be...

Estimating risk preferences is tricky because controlling for confounding factors is difficult. Omitting or imperfectly controlling for these factors can attribute too much observable behavior to risk aversion and bias estimated preferences. Agents often modify risky decisions in response to...