Is Financial Risk-Taking Behavior Genetically Transmitted?

David Cesarini (), Magnus Johannesson (), Paul Lichtenstein, Orjan Sandewall and Björn Wallace ()
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Paul Lichtenstein: Karolinska Institutet, Postal: Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Stockholm, Sweden
Björn Wallace: Stockholm School of Economics

No 765, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we use a sample of almost 30,000 Swedish mono- and dizygotic twins to study the heritability of financial risk-taking. Following a major pension reform in the year 2000, virtually all Swedish adults had to simultaneously make a financial decision affecting post-retirement wealth. We take this event as a field experiment to infer risk preferences. We use standard techniques from behavior genetics to partition variation in risk-taking into environmental and genetic components. Our findings suggest that genetic variation is an important source of individual heterogeneity in financial risk-taking.

Keywords: Genetics; Risk-Taking; Portfolio Investment; Twins (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09-23

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0765

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