The Australian Twins Economic Preferences Survey

This article describes the Australian Twins Economic Preferences Survey (ATEPS). The data set comprises a wide variety of preference and behavioral measures (risk aversion, impatience, ambiguity aversion, trust, confidence) elicited using incentivized decision tasks. One-thousand one-hundred twenty Australian adult twins (560 pairs) completed the survey, making it one of the largest data sets containing incentivized preference measures of twins. As the survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also collected information on experiences related to the pandemic, along with a variety of questions on political attitudes and mental wellbeing. We hope that ATEPS can make a valuable contribution to social science and genetics research.

Cognitive Skills and Economic Preferences in the Fund Industry

By running a battery of experiments with fund managers, we investigate the impact of cognitive skills and economic preferences on their professional decisions. First, we find that fund managers’ risk tolerance positively correlates with fund risk when accounting for fund benchmark, fund category, and other controls. Second, we show that fund managers’ ambiguity tolerance positively correlates with the funds’ tracking error from the benchmark. Finally, we report that cognitive skills do not explain fund performance in terms of excess returns. However, we do find that fund managers with high cognitive reflection abilities compose funds at lower risk.

Like principal, like agent? Managerial preferences in employee-owned firms

The relationship between firms’ owners and managers is a quintessential example of costly principal–agent interaction. Optimal design of monetary incentives and supervision mechanisms are the two traditional ways of reducing agency costs in this relationship. In this paper, we show evidence which is consistent with a third mechanism: firms have managers whose economic preferences are aligned with owners' interests. We uncover differences in economic preferences between managers employed in firms controlled by two distinct classes of ‘patrons’: employee-owned firms (worker cooperatives) and conventional investor-owned firms. In a high-stakes lab-in-the-field experiment, we find that co-op managers are less risk-loving and more altruistic than their conventional counterparts. We do not observe differences between the two groups in terms of time preferences, reciprocity, and trust. Our findings are consistent with existing evidence on worker cooperatives, such as their tendency to self-select into less risky industries and their compressed compensation structures.

Economic preferences and trade outcomes

Integrating the Global Preference Survey (GPS) and its data of unique scope on national preference structures in patience, risk attitude and reciprocity into a gravity framework, this paper is the first to explore a potential influence on international trade outcomes of economic and social preferences in a unified setting. Adding to the evidence on preferences’ importance for aggregate outcomes, the authors find marked differences in trade flows and relationships, both on the country-level and between bilateral partners. Their main results suggest that countries differing in their willingness to behave negatively reciprocal tend to trade significantly less amongst each other due to the destabilizing effect of unexpected punishments. On the other hand, countries that are patient or risk-averse tend to shift towards exporting more differentiated goods as opposed to homogeneous goods and vice versa. We propose term and risk transformation considerations as the driving mechanisms for this relationship.