On The Origins of Risk-Taking in Financial Markets

Sandra Black, Paul Devereux, Petter Lundborg and Kaveh Majlesi

No 2015/7, Knut Wicksell Working Paper Series from Lund University, Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies

Abstract: Risk-taking in financial markets is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use data on stock market participation of Swedish adoptees and relate this to the investment behavior of both their biological and adoptive parents. We find that stock market participation of parents increases that of children by about 34% and that both pre-birth and post-birth factors are important. However, once we condition on having positive financial wealth, we find that nurture has a much stronger influence on risk-taking by children, and the evidence of a relationship between stock-holding of biological parents and their adoptive children becomes weaker. We find similar results when we study the share of financial wealth that is invested in stocks. This suggests that a substantial proportion of the transmission of risk behavior from parents to children is environmentally determined.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; nature versus nurture; portfolio allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 J13 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2015-08-01
Note: Full text versions of the paper: http://www.lusem.lu.se/media/kwc/working-papers/2015/wp_2015_7_full.pdf
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: On the Origins of Risk-Taking in Financial Markets (2017)
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