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.

Links: 19th July 2010

1. "Avoiding a Lost Generation: How to Minimize the Impact of the Great Recession on Young Workers": Testimony before Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress on May 26th, 2010. By James Sherk: Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics at the The Heritage Foundation.

2. "The Kids Aren’t Alright — A Labor Market Analysis of Young Workers": Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (Economic Policy Institute): EPI Briefing Paper #258, April 7, 2010.

3. The Browne Review (or the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance) is a panel which will consider the future direction of higher education funding in England. It was launched on the 9 November 2009 and is being chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP. Wikipedia provides additional information.

4. "Policy Watch: Income-Contingent College Loans": Alan B. Krueger and William G. Bowen, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 193-201

5. ESRI Higher Education Policy Conference: "Higher Education Policy: Evidence from Ireland and Europe". Venue: The ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2. Date: 16/11/2010.

6. David Willetts MP, the UK universities minister: "If You Can't Get a Job, Start a Business", Guardian: 16th July 2010.

7. On a lighter note, one for Dr. Kev: "Irishmen prefer to be single, survey shows". "Lee-Ann Burke, a lecturer in economics at University College Cork , said the study contradicts other surveys showing men happier being married."

8. Google Offers OCR: when you import files into Google Docs (JPEG, GIF, PNG, or PDF) you have the option of running optical character recognition on them.

9. The Turbulence Ahead blog got a makeover.

10. Finally, here's a video of Pete Lunn (ESRI) speaking at the Irish Economics and Psychology event last November, on "A Computational Theory of Exchange". Thanks to Karl Deeter for organising the video; if you follow this link, you will see other talks from the event by Marcel Das, Stephen Kinsella and Jonathan Murphy.

Economics and Psychology Conference

This is just by way of update. Our second Economics and Psychology conference will take place on November 6th in Dublin. The exact venue will be confirmed shortly. I would like people to start thinking about their submissions. Particularly, if you are a PhD student and want to present feel free to get in contact for advice about preparing an abstract and presentation.

http://sites.google.com/site/econpsychireland/