Sosyal bağlar ve risk toleransı: Türkiye'deki kadınlar üzerinde bulgular

Are informal social institutions embedded in measured risk preferences? In this study, we analyze whether attitudinal differences in risk are attributable to the degree of support received from different social circles. We relate measures of perceived social support from 3 different backgrounds (family, friends and neighborhood) to experimental measures of risk preferences. We employ an incentivized choice task and a large-stakes hypothetical lottery question to elicit risk preferences. We find that individuals who report higher social support tend to make more risky choices in an incentivized risk task. This relationship is robust to the inclusion of a wide variety of controls, and region fixed effects. The link between social support and risk choices is partly moderated via access to funds from social networks. We control for the effects of various characteristics including psychological health, cognitive ability, religiosity, socio-economic status, neighborhood quality, and several household characteristics. Our results suggest that psychological health and religiosity have significant effects, while cognitive ability does not seem to influence incentivized risk choices.