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Homo reciprocans: Survey evidence on behavioural outcomes

This article complements the experimental literature that has shown the importance of reciprocity for behaviour in stylised labour markets or other decision settings. We use individual measures of reciprocal inclinations in a large, representative survey and relate reciprocity to real world labour market behaviour and life outcomes. We find that reciprocity matters and that the way in which it matters ...

Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?

The Intergenerational Transmission of Risk and Trust Attitudes

Recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals, assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models. This paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature: (1) transmission of attitudes from parents to children; (2) an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment ...

Interpreting Time Horizon Effects in Inter-Temporal Choice

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs find constant or increasing discounting. As a whole, the data are not consistent with any of these usual ...

On the Relationship between Cognitive Ability and Risk Preference

Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants and Behavioral Consequences

This paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects' homes. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks “in general”, we find that gender, age, height, and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks. The experiment confirms ...

Risk Attitudes and the Incidence of Informality among Workers: Evidence from a Transition Country

Time-Varying Individual Risk Attitudes over the Great Recession: A Comparison of Germany and Ukraine

We use the panel data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to investigate whether risk attitudes have primary (exogenous) determinants that are valid in different stages of economic development and in a different structural context, comparing a mature capitalist economy and a transition economy. We then analyze the stability of the risk ...

On the Psychology of the Relation between Optimism and Risk Taking

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 outcomes, pessimists focus on the bad outcomes of risk. The tendency to focus on good or bad outcomes of risk in ...

Numeracy and Unemployment Duration

Governments are showing an increasing interest in quantitative models that give insights into the determinants of unemployment duration. Yet, these models oftentimes do not explicitly take into account that unemployment prospects are influenced by personality characteristics that are not being fully captured by variables in administrative data. Using German survey data linked with administrative data, ...