Standard economic theory assumes that individual risk taking decisions are independent from the social context. Recent experimental evidence however shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. In particular, subjects strive for balance in the...

While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed that indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks. This paper combines survey data and field experiments with three different tools...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment. We relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant redictors of health...

While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed and indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks. This paper utilizes a natural experiment with covariate (drought) and...

This study explores people's risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they explain an extensive set of risky behavior from a large household survey. We find overall positive correlation between items and low explanatory power in terms of behavior. Using an average of seven risk elicitation...

A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

This study explores people's risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in...

We consider the external validity of laboratory measures of risk attitude. Based on a large-scale experiment using a representative panel of the Dutch population, we test if these measures can explain two different types of behavior: (i) behavior in laboratory risky financial decisions, and (ii)...