Prof. Mark Browne (St. John's University)

Program

• Date: 19.07.2016
  Time: 10am - 11:30am
  Location: Schackstr. 4, room 307
  Topic: Family Transitions and Risk Attitude

We use the German Socio Economic Panel to analyze the impact of life changing events on individu-als’ risk tolerance levels over time. The dataset follows a representative sample of the German popula-tion. We find substantial changes in risk attitudes over time with respect to getting married or separat-ing from a partner, giving birth to a child for the first time, and providing care to a family member. Fur-thermore, we find that these effects are associated with household structure. In particular, we observe that the risk tolerance of individuals that are referred as the head of household demonstrates stronger changes associated with life events while children living in the household moderate the changes asso-ciated with the dissolution of households.