IQ, patience & risk aversion

The more intelligent a person is, the less risk averse and more patient they are. The study, "Are Risk Aversion and Impatience
Related to Cognitive Ability?" done by Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, David Huff man and Uwe Sunde found a significant relationship between these variables when they surveyed a thousand German participants drawn from the general population. 

If this relationship holds across countries and on an aggregate level, it would suggest that countries with low average IQ's have additional barriers to overcome.  It might even suggest that countries with lower average IQ's implement policies of forced savings to increase the focus on the long run, though given how corrupt the governments of these countries are any policy that actually gets implemented is likely to be inefficient at the margin.

(No HT for the study, because I forgot where I found this study.)

About

I studied Bioengineering at the University of California at San Diego. While there I served as a trustee on the investment committee of the UCSD Student Foundation, a group that manages an endowment to fund scholarships. While in college I applied my interest in finance and economics by working as a summer associate at Clarium Capital Management, working part time my senior year, and joining full time when I graduated in 2006, staying there through August 2010. I am currently working as a portfolio manager at another global macro hedge-fund in the Presidio (And blogging about more directly market related ideas at their restricted blog). I’ve been focusing on quantitative finance, currencies, commodities, the interplay between finance and politics, demography and other long term trends.

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