Dr. Andrea Filippetti works for Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome, Italy. Dr. Filippetti finished his Ph.D. at Birkbeck in 2009 and has many collaborations with our fellow researchers. In this video, Dr. Filippetti introduces his co-authored CIMR working paper, Individual risk attitudes and local unemployment: Evidence from Italy in the Great Recession. Dr. Filippetti and his co-author look into an intriguing question of how the economic environment affects people’s attitudes towards risks. Specifically, they try to figure out how the change in local labor market conditions influence individual’s risk propensity during recessions in 2008 and 2011. They find that when there is a shock on the labor market, the greater the increase in the unemployment rate, the more people become risk-averse, which is a counter-intuitive finding but very enlightening for policymakers. This research in particular casts doubts on how easily entrepreneurship policies can be used to help economies find their way out of periods of recession.
