We analyze experimental data obtained from an ultimatum game framed as a situation of employee–employer negotiation over salaries. Parallel to this, we elicit subjects’ risk attitudes. In the existing literature, it has often been conjectured that gender differences in strategic environments...

We model an urban labour market in a developing economy, incorporating workers’ risk attitudes. Trade-offs between risk aversion and ability determine worker allocation across formal and informal wage employment, and voluntary and involuntary self employment. Greater risk of informal wage...

This paper investigates whether immigrants adapt to the attitudes of the majority population in the host country by focusing on the effect of ethnic persistence and assimilation on individual risk proclivity. Employing information from a unique representative German survey, we find that...

This paper questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro-data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this question has immediate relevance for many economic issues. We assemble the data from 15 sets of experiments with one simple underlying investment game. Most of these experiments were not designed to investigate gender...

The purpose of the study is to better understand human capital investment decisions of the working poor, and to collect information that can be used to design a policy to induce the poor to invest in human capital. We use laboratory experimental methodology to elicit the preferences and observe...

This paper analyses the impact of risk attitudes on the decision to become self-employed among individuals who grew up under the communist regime in Ukraine, which banned self-employment so that individuals could not observe what it is like to be self-employed. Since the intra-family...

The paper investigates the role of social norms as a determinant of individual attitudes by analyzing risk proclivity reported by immigrants and natives in a unique representative German survey. We employ factor analysis to construct measures of immigrants’ ethnic persistence and assimilation....

Arguments about the appropriate discount rate often start by assuming a Utilitarian social welfare function with isoelastic utility, in which the consumption discount rate is a function of the (constant) elasticity of marginal utility along with the (much discussed) utility discount rate. In...