Abstract
Using ultrasound scan data from paediatric hospitals, and the exogenous ‘shock’ of learning the gender of an unborn baby, the paper documents the first causal evidence that offspring gender affects adult risk-aversion. On a standard Holt-Laury criterion, parents of daughters, whether unborn or recently born, become almost twice as risk-averse as parents of sons. The study demonstrates this in longitudinal and cross-sectional data, for fathers and mothers, for babies in the womb and new-born children, and in a West European nation and East European nation. These findings may eventually aid our understanding of risky health behaviors and gender inequalities.
Highlights
There is growing awareness in the industrialized nations that, because many traditional contagious diseases have been approximately conquered, people’s choices and behaviors play a crucial role in their healthiness through life (Banks et al, 2006)
We found no association between risk tolerance and foetal sex before week 20 by which time the purported pregnancy losses should already have occurred
This paper is motivated by two issues that are of increasing concern within modern society
Summary
There is growing awareness in the industrialized nations that, because many traditional contagious diseases have been approximately conquered, people’s choices and behaviors play a crucial role in their healthiness through life (Banks et al, 2006). Socalled risky health behaviors have become central to the future of medicine and health policy. The motivation for such behaviors, remains imperfectly understood. A key parameter involved in health choices and economic choices is the individual’s underlying degree of risk-aversion (as sometimes measured by the second derivative of a utility function). Everyday observation suggests that humans vary greatly in their tolerance for risk. Causal and near-causal evidence, appears to be limited to recent work on health shocks by Decker and Schmitz (2016), on historical recessions by Malmendier and Nagel (2011), and on cognitive load by Deck and Jahedi (2015)
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