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Why your banker plays it safe

The risk in banking doesn't come from culture but from structure

Is there something about the culture and professional identity of banks that makes their employees risk-averse?	Photo: Reuters
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Is there something about the culture and professional identity of banks that makes their employees risk-averse? Photo: Reuters

Matt Levine | Bloomberg
Here is a fun behavioural economics experiment. Ernst Fehr and Michel Marechal of the University of Zurich and Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan got “128 employees of a large, international bank”, gave them some money, and asked them to make a bet with it:
 
“They were given US $200 of which they could invest any amount in a risky asset which (i) paid back 2.5 times the investment with 50% probability or (ii) nothing with 50% probability. Participants knew these probabilities and were allowed to keep all the money they did not invest. We use the dollar