We will use this space each week in the news blast for Justin to share new ideas he thinks may be of interest for our behavioral & experimental community. If you ever have ideas for topics, please share your ideas with
Justin
.
This Week's BRITE Idea:
For this week's BRITE Ideas we want to highlight a recent
working paper
by Armando Meier at Chicago Booth titled "Emotions, Risk Attitudes, and Patience."
His paper looks at whether measured preferences toward risk and patience are influenced by emotional states. He uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel that allows him to track individual differences in recently experienced emotions, such as anger, happiness and fear and correlate those within person changes to how people answer a general risk question and how they perceive their general level of patience.
He's able to get at causal effects by looking at plausibly exogenous shocks involving the death of a parent or child. The key take-away is that there are sizable changes in measured risk attitudes and patience driven by changes in emotions.
