Economic Inquiry

We find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men. Using U.S. sample data, we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking. As wealth increases, the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men. Gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age, race, and number of children. Greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women's lower levels of wealth compared with men's. (JEL J16, D81, G11)

Self‐control, mental accounting, and framing are incorporated in a behavioral enrichment of the life‐cycle theory of saving called the Behavioral Life‐Cycle (BLC) hypothesis. The key assumption of the BLC theory is that households treat components of their wealth as nonfungible, even in the absence of credit rationing. Specifically, wealth is assumed to be divided into three mental accounts: current income, current assets, and future income. The temptation to spend is assumed to be greatest for current income and least for future income. Considerable empirical support for the BLC theory is presented, primarily drawn from published econometric studies.

In this article, we investigate the long‐run relationships among disasters, capital accumulation, total factor productivity, and economic growth. The cross‐country empirical analysis demonstrates that higher frequencies of climatic disasters are correlated with higher rates of human capital accumulation, increases in total factor productivity, and economic growth. Though disaster risk reduces the expected rate of return to physical capital, risk also serves to increase the relative return to human capital. Thus, physical capital investment may fall, but there is also a substitution toward human capital investment. Disasters also provide the impetus to update the capital stock and adopt new technologies, leading to improvements in total factor productivity.

This article shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms of the consequences of the action irrespective of the set of alternatives. It means in particular that negatively reciprocal behavior cannot be fully captured by equity models that are exclusively based on preferences over the distribution of material payoffs.

This paper distinguishes two types of asymmetry in business cycles: deepness and steepness. Deepness is defined as the characteristic that troughs are further below trend than peaks are above. Most previous research has focused exclusively on steepness, which refers to cycles in which contractions are steeper than expansions. A test for deepness is proposed and applied to U.S. post‐war quarterly unemployment, real GNP, and industrial production. Evidence of deepness is found for unemployment and industrial production, while the evidence for real GNP is weaker. Previous evidence of steepness in unemployment is confirmed.

A growing number of field and experimental studies focus on the institutional arrangements by which individuals are able to solve collective action problems. Important in this research is the role of reciprocity and institutions that facilitate cooperation via opportunities for monitoring, sanctioning, and rewarding others. Sanctions represent a cost to both the participant imposing the sanction and the individual receiving the sanction. Rewards represent a zero‐sum transfer from participants giving to those receiving rewards. We contrast reward and sanction institutions in regard to their impact on cooperation and efficiency in the context of a public goods experiment. (JEL C92)

The ultimatum game has generated considerable interest because experimental evidence strongly rejects the standard game‐theoretic predictions. A limitation to this general result is the possibility that experimental results are an artifact of small stakes. Implementing the ultimatum game in Indonesia makes it possible to raise the stakes to three times the monthly expenditure of the average participant. Even with these sizable incentives, results do not uniformly approach the sub‐game perfect, selfish outcomes. More specifically, responders become more willing to accept a given percentage offer at higher stakes, but proposer behavior is largely invariant to stake changes. (JEL C91, C78)

Theories of commitment, altruism, and reciprocity have been invoked to explain and describe behavior in public goods and social dilemma situations. Commitment has been used to explain behaviors like water conservation and voting. Altruism has been applied to explain contributions to charities and intergenerational transfers and bequests. Reciprocity has been invoked to explain gift exchange and labor market decisions. This paper describes a set of experiments, which distinguish between these competing theories by testing their comparative statics predictions in a linear public goods setting. Results provide strong support for reciprocity theories over either theories of commitment or of altruism. (JEL C9, D64, H41, C72)

Multinational enterprises are often accused of having a preference for investing in countries in which the working populations' civil and political rights are largely disregarded. This article presents an empirical investigation of the popular “political repression boosts FDI” hypothesis and arrives at the conclusion that the hypothesis is not supported. On the contrary, multinational enterprises rather appear to be attracted by countries in which civil and political freedom is respected.

The time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy is due to the effects of tax distortions. Thus the issue of how to improve upon the time‐consistent suboptimal monetary policy is related to that of the coordination of monetary and fiscal policy. We present a model with three players (the central bark, the fiscal authority, and wage setters) in which distortionary taxes are explicitly modelled. We show that binding commitments to monetary rules are not necessarily welfare improving if monetary and fiscal policy are not coordinated. We also examine the effects of different degrees of independence of the central bank.