Economic models assuming that individuals’ risk preferences are invariant over time are unable to account for the large fluctuations observed in the prices of risky assets, in particular in the wake of a financial crisis. For this reason, the hypothesis that attitudes towards risks are constant has been abandoned by economists. In “Risk Aversion and Financial Crisis” Luigi Guiso summarizes the state of the art of recent literature trying to explain why willingness to bear risk may vary over time, both at aggregate and individual level, focusing on the approaches studying the variation of single investors’ risk aversion. A first approach has found a correlation between the level of risk tolerance and age (adults are usually more risk averse than young) and showed that the latter may explain trends in aggregate risk aversion if the age-distribution of the population changes, but per se cannot explain fluctuations in risk attitudes over the business cycles. A second approach has investigated the relationship between emotions (such as mood, fear and anger) and the degree of risk tolerance and has shown that changes in emotions, induced by catastrophic events (traumas), either economic or non-economic, can lead to a significant decrease in the willingness to bear risk. As long as a financial crisis represents a traumatic experience for many, it can induce large upward swings in risk aversion and, most importantly, this effect can last long, thus explaining why recoveries after a financial crisis are so slow. Finally, by using direct measures of risk aversion elicited in surveys or even in experiments, recent empirical research documents a dramatic increase of individuals’ risk aversion after the 2008 financial crisis, which can be ascribed to both economic and psychological factors.