Higher Order Risk Attitudes, Demographics, and Financial Decisions

We conduct an experiment to study the prevalence of the higher order risk attitudes of prudence and temperance, in a large demographically representative sample, as well as in a sample of undergraduate students. Participants make pairwise choices between lotteries of the form proposed by Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006). The choices in these lotteries isolate prudent from imprudent, and temperate from intemperate, behavior. We relate individuals’ risk aversion, prudence, and temperance levels to demographics and financial decisions. We observe that the majority of individuals’ decisions are consistent with risk aversion, prudence, and temperance, in both the student and the demographically representative sample. An individual’s level of prudence is predictive of his wealth, saving, and borrowing behavior outside of the experiment, while temperance predicts the riskiness of portfolio choices. Our findings suggest that the coefficient of relative prudence for a representative individual is approximately equal to two.prudence;temperance;saving;portfolio choice;experiment

Willa Cather's novels

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The social realism of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1946. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Onward: How a Regional Temperance Magazine for Children Survived and Flourished in the Victorian Marketplace

This paper explores the purpose, use and content of nineteenth-century children’s temperance magazines by a case study of Onward (1869-1910, monthly), examining significant changes over a key forty-year period. Technological developments and the influence of competing publications led the magazine to transform its content, typography, format and size, decade by decade. What began as a regional title reached a national circulation of 250,000, and the changes implemented reveal its twin priorities of integration of readers into the Temperance movement, and the creation of a competitive "brand" of juvenile magazine

Exploring Higher-Order Risk Effects

Higher-order risk effects play an important role in examining economic behavior under uncertainty. A precautionary demand for saving has been linked to the property of prudence and the property of temperance has been used to show how the presence of an unavoidable risk affects one’s behavior towards a second risk. These two properties also play key roles in aversion to negative skewness and to kurtosis, respectively. Both properties recently have been characterized by preferences over lottery pairs in simple 50-50 gambles. The simplicity of this characterization is ideal for experimental investigation. This paper reports the results of such experiments and concludes that there is behavioral evidence for prudence, but not for temperance. Implications of these results for both expected-utility and non-expected-utility models are examined.risk, prudence, temperance, laboratory experiments

A Historical Analysis, Critical Interpretation, and Contemporary Application of the Virtue of Temperance

The purpose of this thesis is to provide a thorough and relevant account of the virtue of temperance, working from within its status as a cardinal virtue in classical and Christian moral thought. With this objective, it undertakes an historical analysis and interpretation of temperance in the work of seven major philosophers and theologians before applying it to the contemporary issue of consumerism. Of the four cardinal virtues, only temperance has virtually disappeared from common usage. The ‘temperance movements’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries left temperance with a highly restricted definition and scope; at present, its principal definition is either ‘abstinence from drinking’ or ‘everything in moderation’. As a result – and despite the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics – temperance is often forgotten or dismissed, as when Peter Geach called it ‘humdrum’ virtue and ‘nothing to get excited about.’ Yet temperance was once a dynamic component of the moral life. For centuries, within both the classical and Christian traditions, temperance engaged the interest of numerous philosophers and theologians. Through an historical survey and critical analysis, this thesis explores the nuanced history of the virtue of temperance in the work of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Wesley. Their portrayals of temperance provide an ideal starting point for any retrieval of the virtue. Within this historical analysis, various interpretive threads begin to emerge – self-control, knowledge, mode, humility, and harmonious order. These five components of temperance are the center of this thesis and its interpretation of the virtue of temperance. The thesis then applies this new understanding of temperance to the modern issue of consumerism, using it as a lens to examine the tenets and ethos of Western consumer culture. Rather than commonplace and irrelevant, the virtue of temperance emerges again as a vibrant component of contemporary moral discussion

Putting Risk in its Proper Place

This paper examines preferences towards particular classes of lottery pairs. We show how concepts such as prudence and temperance can be fully characterized by a preference relation over these lotteries. If preferences are defined in an expected-utility framework with differentiable utility, the direction of preference for a particular class of lottery pairs is equivalent to signing the nth derivative of the utility function. What makes our characterization appealing is its simplicity, which seems particularly amenable to experimentation.properness, prudence, risk apportionment, risk aversion, stochastic dominance, temperance, utility premium

Some social and religious challenges of young working women to the community

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Moment characterization of higher-order risk preferences

It is often said that prudence and temperance play key roles in aversion to negative skewness and kurtosis, respectively. This paper puts a new perspective on these relationships and presents a characterization of higher-order risk preferences in terms of statistical moments. An implication is, for example, that prudence implies preference for distributions with higher skewness as defined by all odd moments. Moreover, we show that this preference is robust towards variation in kurtosis as defined by all even moments. We thus speak of the kurtosis robustness feature of prudence. Further, we show that all higher-order risk preferences of odd order imply skewness preference, but for different distributions than prudence. Similar results are presented for temperance and higher-order risk preferences of even order that can be related to kurtosis aversion and have a skewness robustness feature.decision making under risk, higher-order risk preferences, kurtosis aversion, moments, prudence, skewness preference, temperance

Revisiting a Moral Panic: Ascetic Protestantism, Attitudes to Alcohol and the Implementation of the Licensing Act 2003

This paper examines the popular reaction to the implementation of licensing reforms in England and Wales in 2005. It characterises these events as an episode of moral panic and seeks an ideological explanation for this alarmist response. Utilising historical perspectives, the paper draws particular attention to the formative importance of the Nineteenth Century in terms of constructing contemporary public attitudes towards alcohol. This paper draws on existing sociology and social history to highlight an international and chronological pattern which suggests a connection between Victorian temperance movements and ascetic brands of Protestantism. Through a consideration of Max Weber, E.P. Thompson and a variety of primary sources, an interpretive explanation for this pattern is provided. Legal evidence, showing the growth of alcohol regulation and the partial enforcement of temperance codes of behaviour, is then used to illustrate the survival and secularisation of temperance views from the Nineteenth Century onwards. An interpretive analysis of public discourse surrounding licensing reform in 2005 provides empirical support for this argument. Attitudes to alcohol exhibited during this episode were found to bear qualitative similarities to Calvinist-inspired temperance beliefs. The paper argues that ascetic Protestant attitudes to alcohol have achieved a wide currency and now occupy a hegemonic position within secular British society. The public reaction to the implementation of the Licensing Act 2003 is thus reinterpreted as a moral panic largely constructed by ascetic Protestant beliefs.Alcohol, Attitudes, Morality, Calvinism, Ascetic Protestantism, Licensing Act 2003