{"title":"Risky and non-risky financial investments and cognition","authors":"Nicolau Martin-Bassols","doi":"10.1016/j.joep.2023.102677","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Much policy attention has been placed on encouraging saving behaviours to avoid financial deprivation at older adulthood. However, optimising financial investments is highly dependent on cognitive capacity, which can be deteriorated by the natural ageing process. This paper explores the relationship between age-related cognitive deterioration with risky and non-risky financial investments. The data analysed comes from eight waves (2002 to 2019) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) which, for a nationally representative sample, contains information about cognitive ability and their ownership of financial investments over time. Cognition emerges as one of the strongest predictors of the type and number of financial products that individuals hold. Specifically, the results show a positive relation of cognitive level with risky and non-risky financial investments. Even alongside other important factors – such as education, labour status, age, and household wealth – the explanatory power of cognition is found to be significant at the 0.1% significance level. The results are robust when accounting for unobservables and when using a genetic measure of cognition as main explanatory variable. More importantly, cognitive deterioration is only significantly associated with risky financial investments. That means, individuals reduce their risky financial investments when they start suffering old age related cognitive deterioration, while they do not change their holdings in non-risky ones in a significant manner. There are also no significant differences in the reactions to stock-market fluctuations due to cognitive level. In other words, individuals react to stock market fluctuations changing their financial holdings, but those reactions do not differ due to their cognitive level.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48318,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Economic Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487023000788","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Much policy attention has been placed on encouraging saving behaviours to avoid financial deprivation at older adulthood. However, optimising financial investments is highly dependent on cognitive capacity, which can be deteriorated by the natural ageing process. This paper explores the relationship between age-related cognitive deterioration with risky and non-risky financial investments. The data analysed comes from eight waves (2002 to 2019) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) which, for a nationally representative sample, contains information about cognitive ability and their ownership of financial investments over time. Cognition emerges as one of the strongest predictors of the type and number of financial products that individuals hold. Specifically, the results show a positive relation of cognitive level with risky and non-risky financial investments. Even alongside other important factors – such as education, labour status, age, and household wealth – the explanatory power of cognition is found to be significant at the 0.1% significance level. The results are robust when accounting for unobservables and when using a genetic measure of cognition as main explanatory variable. More importantly, cognitive deterioration is only significantly associated with risky financial investments. That means, individuals reduce their risky financial investments when they start suffering old age related cognitive deterioration, while they do not change their holdings in non-risky ones in a significant manner. There are also no significant differences in the reactions to stock-market fluctuations due to cognitive level. In other words, individuals react to stock market fluctuations changing their financial holdings, but those reactions do not differ due to their cognitive level.
期刊介绍：
The Journal aims to present research that will improve understanding of behavioral, in particular psychological, aspects of economic phenomena and processes. The Journal seeks to be a channel for the increased interest in using behavioral science methods for the study of economic behavior, and so to contribute to better solutions of societal problems, by stimulating new approaches and new theorizing about economic affairs. Economic psychology as a discipline studies the psychological mechanisms that underlie economic behavior. It deals with preferences, judgments, choices, economic interaction, and factors influencing these, as well as the consequences of judgements and decisions for economic processes and phenomena. This includes the impact of economic institutions upon human behavior and well-being. Studies in economic psychology may relate to different levels of aggregation, from the household and the individual consumer to the macro level of whole nations. Economic behavior in connection with inflation, unemployment, taxation, economic development, as well as consumer information and economic behavior in the market place are thus among the fields of interest. The journal also encourages submissions dealing with social interaction in economic contexts, like bargaining, negotiation, or group decision-making. The Journal of Economic Psychology contains: (a) novel reports of empirical (including: experimental) research on economic behavior; (b) replications studies; (c) assessments of the state of the art in economic psychology; (d) articles providing a theoretical perspective or a frame of reference for the study of economic behavior; (e) articles explaining the implications of theoretical developments for practical applications; (f) book reviews; (g) announcements of meetings, conferences and seminars.
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