rate contracts in the presence of output risk, and provide novel insights that reference dependent preferences affect the … tradeoff between risk and incentives. Subjects in our experiments choose their compensation for performing a real-effort task … from a menu of linear piece rate and fixed payment combinations. As classical principal-agent models predict, more risk …

This paper analyses the impact of risk attitudes on the decision to become self-employed among individuals who grew up … correlation between risk preferences and self-employment after transition is unlikely to be driven by parents transmitting self …-employment experience and risk preferences to their children. Robustness checks on a sample of East Germans confirm that such a third factor …

take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is … strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of personality and that it predicts real-life risk taking. The general risk … question captures this disposition alongside pure risk preference. This enlightens why the general risk question is a better …

-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample (IABS). We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the … risk attitudes of individuals working in these occupations. We find that willingness to take risk is positively correlated … with the wage dispersion of an individual's occupation. -- dispersion estimation ; earnings risk ; censoring ; quantile …

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to … take risks. Using a globally representative dataset on risk preference in 76 countries, we empirically document that the … distribution of income in a country has a positive and significant link with the preference for risk. This relationship is …

This paper investigates whether risk preferences explain how individuals are sorted into occupations with different … willingness to take risks whose behavioral relevance has been validated in previous work. As a measure of earnings risk, we use … relating earnings risk to the measure of individual risk preference, our evidence shows that individuals with low willingness …