We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances from 1998 to 2010 to study households’ portfolio risk. We compare alternative measures of ex-ante risk, based on a financial portfolio including deposits, bonds, and stocks, or a broader portfolio also including real estate, business wealth, and related debt. The measures provide different rankings of portfolio risk, but they all show a skewed distribution with many households bearing limited risk. Large wealth holdings lead to more aggressive risk positions. Moreover, risk falls at the beginning of the sample period and rises at the end, together with the business cycle.

We derive the distribution of a proxy for the risk tolerance in a representative sample of U.S. households. Our measure is deduced from the willingness to bear risk as indicated by the variance of returns of each household's observed portfolio. The estimates, obtained assuming constraints on portfolio composition, show substantial heterogeneity across households. We find that risk tolerance falls with age and increases with wealth. Other variables, such as education, gender, race, and household size, do not have a significant relation to risk attitude. Our findings are robust to changes in portfolio definition, asset returns, and sample composition.