O Sole Mio An Experimental Analysis of Weather and Risk Attitudes

This paper provides direct experimental evidence of the effect of sunshine and good weather on individual risk taking. By employing the multiple price list method of Holt and Laury (2002), we show that, after controlling for other vari- ables such as gender, religion and income, sunshine and good weather promote risk taking. This effect is present whether relying on objective measures of mete- orological conditions or subjective weather assessments. We find that bad weather increases our risk aversion estimates by an average of 40%.

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