Risk Tolerance and Entrepreneurship A tradition from Knight (1921) argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but perform worse. We test these predictions with two risk tolerance proxies: stock market participation and personal leverage. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we find that common stock investors are around 50 percent more likely t...

Using a unique dataset which provides information on the financial structure of start-up companies in the Chinese manufacturing industry, this paper documents robust evidence that access to formal financing channels has beneficial effects on firm size, these effects being more marked as we move up the entry size distribution. By contrast we find negative relationships between informal finance a...

The paper reports the result of an experimental game on asset integration and risk taking. We find some evidence that winnings in earlier rounds affect risk taking in subsequent rounds, but no evidence that real life wealth outside the experiment affects risk taking. Controlling for past winnings, participants receiving a low endowment in a round engage in more risk taking. We test a ‘keeping-u...

We test whether the sharp increase in sovereign spreads of euro-area countries with respect to Germany after the explosion of the Greek crisis was due to deteriorating macroeconomic and fiscal fundamentals or to some form of financial contagion. Our analysis includes indicators of domestic and external imbalances which were mostly disregarded by previous studies, and distinguishes between inves...

This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We emphasize the potential of happiness research in testing competing theories of individual behavior. Second, the crucial issue of causality is taken up illus...

We consider a two-country model of wage determination with private information in unionized, imperfectly competitive, industries. We investigate the effects of opening up markets to trade as well as of further market integration on the negotiated wage and the maximum delay in reaching an agreement. From an initial situation of two-way intraindustry trade, an increase in product market integrati...

This paper investigates the growth factors of EU regions in the 1990s. We test the hypothesis that regional growth is determined by endogenous growth factors, trade and technological catching-up in a growth accounting framework. Our estimations suggest that growth of EU regions is positively related to the accumulation of physical and human capital. Innovation activity as well as international ...

We study pure exchange economies with symmetries on preferences up to taste intensity transformations. In a 2-person, 2-good endowment economy, we show that bilateral symmetry on each utility functional precludes a rectangle in the Edgeworth box as the location of Pareto optimal allocations. Under strictly quasi-concave preferences, a larger set can be ruled out. The inadmissible region is stil...

abstract the aim of this study is of the effect of structural changes in higher education on changes of output in sistan and baluchestan province using structural decomposition analysis (sda). the input-output tables of this region for the period 2006-2011 have been employed as the database of the model. the structural changes were decomposed into two factors: changes in share of specific secto...