Two studies attempted to discriminate between a situationaleconomic and a cultural explanation for the recently reported finding that Chinese from the People's Republic of China (PRC) are more risk-seeking than Americans. Both studies compared American and Chinese proverbs related to risk and...

In this article, we describe a multistudy project designed to explain observed cross-national differences in risk taking between respondents from the People's Republic of China and the United States. Using this example, we develop the following recommendations forcross-cultural investigations....

Prospect theory's S-shaped weighting function is often said to reflect the psychophysics of chance. We propose an affective rather than psychophysical deconstruction of the weighting function resting on two assumptions. First, preferences depend on the affective reactions associated with...

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to...

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this...

We analyze efficient risk-sharing arrangements when coalitions may deviate. Coalitions form to insure against idiosyncratic income risk. Self-enforcing contracts for both the original coalition and any deviating coalition rely on a belief in future cooperation which we term \social capital". We...

The most recent financial crisis highlights the importance of event risks and the ensuing market illiquidity and worsening investment opportunity set for optimal portfolio selection. However, the existing portfolio selection literature does not consider the joint impact of these risks. In this...

We model a decision maker who can exert costly effort to adapt her risk assessments, thereby optimizing the value of her risky prospects. We provide an axiomatic characterization of the model, and show how costs of adaption can be elicited and compared across individuals. In a moral hazard...

It is well known that the implicit insurance provided by labor income taxes can reduce total saving. We show that this insurance can change the composition of saving as well because the reduction in labor-income risk may affect the amount of financial risk that an individual chooses to bear....

This paper proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated. We derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern. It is shown to depend on differences in expected earnings, costs of migration, income risks, and more...