Twin Research and Human Genetics

Table of Contents - 01 August 2010 - Volume 13, Issue 04  

Articles

Are Attitudes Towards Economic Risk Heritable? Analyses Using the Australian Twin Study of Gambling

Anh T. Lea1, Paul W. Millera2 c1, Wendy S. Slutskea3 and Nicholas G. Martina4

a1 School of Economics and Finance, Curtin University of Technology, Australia.

a2 School of Economics and Finance, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. Paul.Miller@curtin.edu.au

a3 University of Missouri, United States of America.

a4 Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia.

Abstract

This study employs multiple regression models based on DeFries and Fulker (1985), and a large sample of twins, to assess heritability in attitudes towards economic risk, and the extent to which this heritability differs between males and females. Consistent with Cesarini et al. (2009), it is found that attitudes towards risk are moderately heritable, with about 20 percent of the variation in these attitudes across individuals being linked to genetic differences. This value is less than one-half the estimates reported by Zyphur et al. (2009) and Zhong et al. (2009). While females are more risk averse than males, there is no evidence that heritability in attitudes towards risk differs between males and females. Even though heritability is shown to be important to economic risk-taking, the analyses suggest that multivariate studies of the determinants of attitudes towards risk which to not take heritability into consideration still provide reliable estimates of the partial effects of other key variables, such as gender and educational attainment.

(Received March 30 2010)

(Accepted April 29 2010)

Keywords

  • economic risk;
  • twins;
  • heritability

Correspondence:

c1 Address for correspondence: Paul W. Miller, School of Economics and Finance, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987 Perth WA 6845, Australia.

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