Do Risk Preferences Change During COVID-19? Comparisons between Pre and On-Pandemic Parallel Experiments

This paper presents evidence that people become more risk-averse during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this result differs between men and women. We use March 13th 2020, when President Trump declared a national state of emergency as a time anchor to separate the experiment into two periods: pre-pandemic and on-pandemic. The pre-pandemic period was conducted February 21, 2020. There are three on-pandemic rounds conducted 10 days, 15 days, 20 days after the Covid-19 emergency declaration. We include four different risk-preference elicitation methods. Men are more sensitive to the pandemic and become more risk-averse based on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. Women become more risk-averse in the Social and Experience Seeking domains based on the results from the Domain-Speci c Risk-Taking and Sensation Seeking Scale. Both men and women's risk-preferences are stable during COVID-19 based on a gamble choice task. The differential outcomes of the risk-taking elicitation methods show the caveats for studies testing for risk-taking changes during COVID-19