Attitudes to Globalisation

A recent NBER paper by Mayda, O'Rourke and Sinnott looks at risk aversion and attitudes to globalisation. They find that risk aversion predicts anti-trade and associated attitudes but less so in countries with big governments. For me, one of the key things here comes down to what we are measuring by risk aversion questions in surveys. The IZA group have done a great deal of work with risk aversion and we have incorporated the risk preferences question in to all of our survey work lately. I am currently trying to examine whether risk preferences question are statistically distinct from things like personality variables and other perception and preference parameters, mostly through factor analysis and other scaling methods. Martin and myself are giving a talk on this in a few weeks.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13037