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Alessandro Bucciol

Bio: Alessandro Bucciol is an academic researcher from University of Verona. The author has contributed to research in topics: Portfolio & Pension. The author has an hindex of 20, co-authored 113 publications receiving 1374 citations. Previous affiliations of Alessandro Bucciol include Bocconi University & University of Amsterdam.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors run an experiment to study the relationship between honesty, age and self-control in children aged between 5 and 15, and find that self control develops within such an age range.

154 citations

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TL;DR: This paper derived the distribution of a proxy for the risk tolerance in a representative sample of U.S. households, deduced from the willingness to bear risk as indicated by the variance of returns of each household's observed portfolio.
Abstract: We derive the distribution of a proxy for the risk tolerance in a representative sample of U.S. households. Our measure is deduced from the willingness to bear risk as indicated by the variance of returns of each household's observed portfolio. The estimates, obtained assuming constraints on portfolio composition, show substantial heterogeneity across households. We find that risk tolerance falls with age and increases with wealth. Other variables, such as education, gender, race, and household size, do not have a significant relation to risk attitude. Our findings are robust to changes in portfolio definition, asset returns, and sample composition.

118 citations

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TL;DR: This paper found that financial risk taking is significantly related to life-history negative events out of an individual's control, such as having been victim of a physical attack and the loss of a child.

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors find that young individuals, males and non-European immigrants in their sample are more likely to travel without a ticket than those traveling with a valid ticket.
Abstract: What are the individual demographic characteristics that correlate with unethical behavior? To answer this question we randomly interviewed 541 passengers who used the bus in Reggio Emilia (Italy). Exploiting the high level of fare evasion (43% without a valid ticket) we find that young individuals, males and non-European immigrants in our sample are more likely to travel without a ticket. Interestingly, traveling with other people correlates with the probability of holding a valid ticket but its effect depends on who the passenger and the others are. Finally, we find that all passengers’ beliefs on fine costs, ticket inspection frequency, and percentage of passengers without a ticket are surprisingly close to actual figures. However, cheaters perceive inspections as more frequent than those traveling with a valid ticket.

89 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of alternative parental teaching strategies on the propensity to save and the amount saved during adulthood was studied using a panel dataset from the Dutch DNB Household Survey and they found that parental teaching to save increases the likelihood that an adult will save by 16% and the saving amount by about 30%.

87 citations


Cited by
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Journal Article
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics.
Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

4,817 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors found that people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks, and that the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them.
Abstract: Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

3,959 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Sep 1941-Nature
TL;DR: Thorndike as discussed by the authors argues that the relative immaturity of the sciences dealing with man is continually stressed, but it is claimed that they provide a body of facts and principles which are "far above zero knowledge" and that even now they are capable of affording valuable guidance in the shaping of public policy.
Abstract: “WHAT can men do, what do they do, and what do they want to do ?”—these are the uestions that Prof. Thorndike seeks to answer in a very comprehensive and elaborate treatise. His undertaking is inspired by the belief that man has the possibility of almost complete control of his fate if only he will be guided by science, and that his failures are attributable to ignorance or folly. The main approach is through biological psychology, but all the social sciences are appealed to and utilized in an effort to deal with the human problem as a whole. The relative immaturity of the sciences dealing with man is continually stressed, but it is claimed that they provide a body of facts and principles which are “far above zero knowledge”, and that even now they are capable of affording valuable guidance in the shaping of public policy. Human Nature and the Social Order By E. L. Thorndike. Pp. xx + 1020. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.) 18s. net.

1,833 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors survey the empirical evidence from the field on three classes of deviations from the standard model: nonstandard prefer- ences, nonstandard beliefs, and nonstandard decision making, and present evidence on overcon- fidence, on the law of small numbers and on projection bias.
Abstract: The research in Psychology and Economics (a.k.a. Behavioral Economics) suggests that individuals deviate from the standard model in three respects: (1) nonstandard prefer- ences, (2) nonstandard beliefs, and (3) nonstandard decision making. In this paper, I survey the empirical evidence from the field on these three classes of deviations. The evidence covers a number of applications, from consumption to finance, from crime to voting, from charitable giving to labor supply. In the class of nonstandard preferences, I discuss time preferences (self-control problems), risk preferences (reference depen- dence), and social preferences. On nonstandard beliefs, I present evidence on overcon- fidence, on the law of small numbers, and on projection bias. Regarding nonstandard decision making, I cover framing, limited attention, menu effects, persuasion and social pressure, and emotions. I also present evidence on how rational actors—firms, employers, CEOs, investors, and politicians—respond to the nonstandard behavior described in the survey. Finally, I briefly discuss under what conditions experience and market interactions limit the impact of the nonstandard features.

1,352 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Limits of Organization as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in the field of economic analysis and policy making, focusing on the role of organization in economic decision-making, and its effect on economic outcomes.
Abstract: (1975). The Limits of Organization. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 543-544.

1,138 citations