Decisions involving risk are usually taken in the presence of other insurable or non-insurable risks, the latter type called background risk. We examine how changing background risk influences risk-taking based on panel data with monthly observations from Senegalese fishermen. Fishing income is...

Structural transformation of agriculture typically involves a gradual increase of mean farm sizes and a reallocation of labor from agriculture to other sectors. Such structural transformation is often fostered through innovations in agriculture and newly emerging opportunities in manufacturing...

This study analyzes how risk attitudes influence the agricultural productivity of men and women in a subSaharan African country, Burkina Faso. By using a large representative panel survey of farmers, the results show that as female farmers increase risk taking, the productivity of female-owned...

This paper focuses on information acquisition and individual decision making in ambiguous situations and presents a novel experimental design which may help to tackle open questions from a fresh perspective. Instead of giving subjects the choice between risky and ambiguous Ellsberg urns, we let...

We relate time-varying aggregate ambiguity (V-VSTOXX) to individual investor trading. We use the trading records of more than 100,000 individual investors from a large German online brokerage from March 2010 to December 2015. We find that an increase in ambiguity is associated with increased...

This paper analyses the concrete post-school decision of school students whether to study or to enter the German VET system. It focuses on the investigation of individual risk preferences and the social background of individuals, and the effect on the ultimate decision to enrol in university or...

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test the predictions of this model using a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh. We show that the...

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test the predictions of this model using a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh. We show that the...