IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ngi/dpaper/14-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Risky rotten kids: an experiment on risk attitudes amongst adolescents in rural Uganda

Author

Listed:
  • Alistair Munro

    (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

  • Yuki Tanaka

    (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

Abstract

According to some simple models of the household, parental transfers should equalize measured risk attitudes amongst family members. We explore the theory behind this notion and then use a Holt-Laury mechanism to compare attitudes to risk amongst 412 teenage children and their parents in 38 rural villages in central and eastern Uganda. Although within household risk preferences appear to be weakly correlated, we find large and systematic differences between parental and child attitudes that are not eliminated by controlling for loss-aversion and background variables such as age and education. Children are substantially more risk loving than their parents and conversely, slightly more loss averse than their parents. When we control for individual, household, village and regional factors the results are largely unchanged and in particular age is not an explanation of the differences in attitudes. We find that some aspects of risk and time preferences are linked to poor performance at school, including repeating a year and dropping out. Overall our results are compatible with a world in which parents protect children from risk. Moreover, because measured risk (and discounting attitudes differ between parents and their children, they suggest the value of measuring the attitudes of both generations when considering the relationship between preferences and schooling decisions.

Suggested Citation

  • Alistair Munro & Yuki Tanaka, 2014. "Risky rotten kids: an experiment on risk attitudes amongst adolescents in rural Uganda," GRIPS Discussion Papers 14-01, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:ngi:dpaper:14-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://grips.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=1137&item_no=1&attribute_id=20&file_no=1
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Andreoni, James & Di Girolamo, Amalia & List, John A. & Mackevicius, Claire & Samek, Anya, 2020. "Risk preferences of children and adolescents in relation to gender, cognitive skills, soft skills, and executive functions," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 729-742.
    2. Alistair Munro, 2018. "Intra†Household Experiments: A Survey," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 134-175, February.
    3. Sutter, Matthias & Zoller, Claudia & Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela, 2019. "Economic behavior of children and adolescents – A first survey of experimental economics results," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 98-121.
    4. Yuki Tanaka & Takashi Yamano, 2015. "Risk and Time Preference on Schooling:Experimental Evidence from a Low-Income Country," GRIPS Discussion Papers 14-24, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ngi:dpaper:14-01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gripsjp.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.