Big Five Personality Traits, Poverty, and Environmental Shocks in Shaping Farmers’ Risk and Time Preferences: Experimental Evidence from Vietnam

Trinh Khoa A. ()
Additional contact information
Trinh Khoa A.: Business Management Department, Greenwich Vietnam, FPT University, Da Nang Campus, 658 Ngo Quyen Street, An Hai, Da Nang, Vietnam

Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, 2025, vol. 19, issue 1, 21

Abstract: This study investigates factors influencing risk and time preferences through experiments with 575 farmers in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, controlling for time effects and selection bias. Using a hyperbolic time-discounting model with fixed and variable cost components and instrumental variable estimation, we find that income poverty – but not multidimensional poverty (MP) – is significantly associated with greater patience. Patience also increases with openness to experience, while conscientiousness and credit access are linked to greater impatience. Credit access may promote short-term decision-making by increasing liquidity, debt pressure, and immediate consumption incentives. Risk preferences, assessed through incentivized and nonincentivized Eckel-Grossman tasks, are not significantly linked to poverty, but are positively associated with credit access, emotional stability, openness, ethnicity, and exposure to natural disasters. Borrowing status strongly correlates with risk tolerance, suggesting that financial access supports calculated risk-taking, whereas MP is negatively related to such behavior. Natural disasters appear to foster adaptive risk-taking through repeated exposure to shocks. Overall, farmers’ economic decisions are more influenced by environmental shocks, personality traits, and credit access than by poverty alone. Policymakers should integrate financial and behavioral strategies – expanding credit, designing adaptive financial tools, and implementing financial literacy programs – to strengthen economic resilience and risk management.

Keywords: Big Five personality traits; multidimensional poverty; natural disaster; risk preferences; time preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 G51 O12 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/econ-2025-0172 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:econoa:v:19:y:2025:i:1:p:21:n:1003

DOI: 10.1515/econ-2025-0172

Access Statistics for this article

Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal is currently edited by Katharine Rockett

More articles in Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().