We study the transmission of risk attititudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivised risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This...

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using different years of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey. Master files are used, expanding the number of available years and permitting provincial rather than regional identifiers. Nonparametric Engel curves are...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation - like Canada's - couples with the same...

First order conditions from the dynamic optimization problems of consumers and firms are important tools in empirical macroeconomics. When estimated on micro-data these equations are typically linearized so standard IV or GMM methods can be employed to deal with the measurement error that is...

This paper is an attempt to answer the long standing question of whether more affluent households save a larger fraction of their income. The major difficulty in empirically assessing the relationship between incomes and saving rates is to construct a credible proxy for long-run income - purged...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation - like Canada's - couples with the same...

Being the leader in a group often involves making risky decisions that affect the payoffs of all members, and the decision to take this responsibility in a group is endogenous in many contexts. In this paper, we experimentally study: (1) the willingness of men and women to make risky decisions...

An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the...

This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the group leader's decision of how much risk to take, we study the...