Previous research shows that transmission of attitudes in the family is gendered. However, there are limited findings about intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes and whether it is gendered. This study replicates the findings by Dohmen et al. (Rev Econ Stud 79(2):645-677) for Germany by using quantitative data from Burkina Faso in 2014 to analyze three different self-reported risk questions. Our results show a strong intergenerational transmission of attitudes from parents to children in which positive assortative mating strengthens the parents' transmission of attitudes to her child. Mothers' transmissions are stronger for their daughters than sons. For fathers, the pattern is inverted. Our findings also show the existence of heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission within a male-and female-dominated risk domain. This supports the gender-specific role model hypothesis. Furthermore, we find support for the transmission of attitudes from the local environment to the child, but the strength and significance of this transmission decrease when controlling for parents' attitudes.

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This study uses sibling correlation to provide novel descriptive evidence of parental and household characteristics on three different risk domains collected in a nationally representative survey from Burkina Faso. The sibling correlations are between 0.51 and 0.83. The correlations are higher in the general risk domain compared to risk taking in financial matters and traffic. Moreover, the sibling correlation is higher for sisters than brothers. We also explore which factors might drive these correlations; parents’ risk attitudes appears to play a role in explaining these correlations, whereas socioeconomic outcomes, family structure, parental health and residential zone seems to have only a limited contribution. We also find that gender seems to be important in explaining the variation in sibling correlations. Mother’s appear to have a stronger contribution on daughters than their sons correlation, whereas father’s help to explain their sons correlation.

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