Preferences after pan(dem)ics: Time and risk in the shadow of COVID-19

Abstract

Abstract This paper uses the COVID-19 health crisis to study how individual preferences respond to generalized traumatic events. We review previous literature on natural and man-made disasters. Using incentive-compatible tasks, we simultaneously estimate risk and ambiguity aversion, time discounting, present bias, and prudence parameters before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown in France. We find patience, risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion fell during lockdown, then gradually returned toward their initial levels 4 months later. These results have implications for health and economic policies, and deepen our understanding of the responses – and resilience – of economic preferences to traumatic events.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.