This paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects’ homes. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks “in general”, we find that gender, age, height, and...

This paper investigates how risk attitudes change over the life course. We study the age trajectory of risk attitudes all the way from early adulthood until old age, in large representative panel data sets from the Netherlands and Germany. Age patterns are generally difficult to identify...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

It has long been hypothesized that individuals’ migration propensities depend on their risk attitudes, but the empirical evidence has been limited and indirect. We use newly available data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to measure directly the relationship between migration and risk...

This paper provides evidence about the determinants of trust and reciprocal inclinations, that is, a tendency for people to respond in kind to hostile or kind actions, in a representative setting. We investigate the prevalence of reciprocity in the population, the correlation between trust and...