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2013 Conference

April 10–12, 2013

The Benson Hotel, Portland, Oregon

This section lists poster sessions as well as concurrent sessions by day, time, and room. Concurrent sessions have multiple presentations. You may search by title, author names, or keyword. A Schedule-at-a-Glance is posted on the Website and will provide the overview. This is the detail.

A Canonical Correlation Analysis of Financial Risk-Taking by Australian Households

Friday, April 12, 2013 at 2:45 PM–4:00 PM PDT
Brighton Room ( Breakout Session A)
Major Area of Focus

Financial Services

Secondary area of focus

Financial Services

Short Abstract

In this paper, we use canonical correlation analysis and data from the 2010 wave of the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to investigate financial risk-taking in Australia. This is an important concern because knowledge of financial risk-taking has important implications for, among other things, consumer wellbeing, financial planning, and retirement incomes policy. We examine the relationships between a range of alternative proxies commonly used to represent financial risk-taking, including self-reported risk-taking attitudes and direct stock and business ownership, and a set of personal attributes, including age, education, sex, household structure, household income, and net assets. The results indicate that the three measures are strongly representative of financial risk-taking. However, the ranking of canonical loading indicates that direct share ownership followed by self-reported risk attitude is respectively the best and second-best indicators of financial risk-attitudes. In terms of the demographic and socioeconomic factors associated with financial risk-taking, the three variables with the highest loading are net assets (0.868), household income (0.514) and education (0.469). Similarly, the negative loadings are consistent with the literature, in that increasing age (-0.111), being female (-0.085), and having children or being in a lone person household (-0.417) contribute to an aversion to financial risk-taking. Interestingly, age and gender each only account for less than one percent of the observed variation in financial risk-taking.

Corresponding Author

[photo]
Andrew Worthington, Ph.D., Griffith University
Job Title

Professor of Finance

City & State (or Province & Country)

Queensland, Australia

Additional Authors

[photo]
Ms. Tracey West, Griffith University
Job Title

Doctoral Candidate

City & State (or Province & Country)

Queensland, Australia

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