Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Risk Attitudes and Well-being in Latin America

Contents:

Author Info

  • Juan Camilo Cárdenas

    ()

  • Jeffrey Carpenter

    ()

Abstract

A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literature 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 from proven. We report on field experiments designed to address many of the problems confounding previous analyses of the links between risk preferences and well-being. Our sample includes more than 3,000 participants who were drawn representatively from six Latin American cities: Bogotá, Buenos Aries, Caracas, Lima, Montevideo, San José. In addition to the experiment which reveals interesting cross-country differences, participants completed an extensive survey that provides data on a variety of well-being indicators and a number of important controls. Focusing on risk preferences, we find little evidence of robust links between risk aversion and wellbeing. However, when we analyze the results of three treatments that add elements of reality to the decision problem, we see that these, more subtle, instruments correlate better with well-being, even after controlling for a variety of other important factors like the accumulation of human capital and access to credit.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://economia.uniandes.edu.co/publicaciones/dcede2010-34.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES-CEDE in its series DOCUMENTOS CEDE with number 007718.

as in new window
Length: 40
Date of creation: 22 Nov 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:col:000089:007718

Contact details of provider:

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. James C. Engle Warnick & Javier Escobal & Sonia C. Laszlo, 2011. "Ambiguity Aversion and Portfolio Choice in Small-Scale Peruvian Farming," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 68.
  2. Antoni Bosch-Domènech & Joaquim Silvestre, 2003. "Do the Wealthy Risk More Money? An Experimental Comparison," Discussion Papers 03-15, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Jeffrey Carpenter & Justin Garcia & J. Lum, 2011. "Dopamine receptor genes predict risk preferences, time preferences, and related economic choices," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 233-261, June.
  2. Philip J. Grossman, 2013. "Holding Fast: The Persistence And Dominance Of Gender Stereotypes," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 51(1), pages 747-763, 01.
  3. Luis Roberto Martínez & Christian Jaramillo & Nicolas De Roux & Juan-Camilo Cárdenas, 2010. "It’s Not My Money: An Experiment on Risk Aversion and the House-money Effect," DOCUMENTOS CEDE 006712, UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES-CEDE.
  4. Jeffrey Carpenter & Tyler Williams, 2010. "Moral hazard, peer monitoring, and microcredit: field experimental evidence from Paraguay," Working Papers 10-6, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:col:000089:007718

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES-CEDE).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.