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You get what you pay for: Incentives and selection in the education system

We analyse worker self-selection, with a special focus on teachers, to explore whether worker composition is generally endogenous. We analyse laboratory experimental data to provide causal evidence on particular sorting patterns. Our field data analysis focuses specifically on selection patterns of teachers. We find that teachers are more risk averse than employees in other professions, indicating ...

Risk Attitudes Across The Life Course

This article investigates how risk attitudes change over the life course. We study the age trajectory of risk attitudes all the way from early adulthood until old age, in large representative panel data sets from the Netherlands and Germany. Age patterns are generally difficult to identify separately from cohort or calendar period effects. We achieve identification by replacing calendar period indicators ...

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 ...