Sunday, November 20, 2011

Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Scotsman ...

Cultural finance research hasn't advanced much beyond looking for differences in national characteristics and testing whether this is linked to differences in cross-country financial behaviour. Country financial-stereotyping, if you will.

The paper I'll be presenting at Friday's Economic and Psychology conference seeks to rectify that a bit by looking at subcultures within a country and whether these are linked to financial decision-making.

Actually the paper began two years ago at this conference in 2009 when Marcel Das of Tilburg presented on the excellent LISS panel survey dataset his team have collected for the Dutch population. This ended up providing the data for the paper.

The paper is available for download on SSRN and the abstract is below. Hopefully I'll have a chance to edit the paper more before Friday, but need to juggle that and the arrival of the mother-in-law which might be quite time-draining! Looking forward to Friday!


Subcultures in Household Financial Decision-Making

Michael Dowling
Dublin City University

Abstract:

Research into cultural influences on financial decision-making is increasingly delivering interesting and novel findings on how households make their financial decisions. This study utilises a large population-representative survey of households in the Netherlands to investigate whether World Values Survey cultural dimensions are related to intra-national differences in household financial decision-making. The main finding is that subcultures characterised as Self-Expressive are more than twice as likely to own risky assets as those on the opposite end of the cultural dimension (Survivalists). These findings are robust to checks for confounding factors such as gender and income.


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