We study the representative consumer’s risk attitude and efficient risk-sharing rules in a singleperiod, single-good economy in which consumers have homogeneous probabilistic beliefs but heterogeneous risk attitudes. We prove that if all consumers have convex absolute risk tolerance, so must the representative consumer. We also identify a relationship between the curvature of an individual cons...

Abstract We empirically show that sample information not only moderates prospects’ outcome ambiguity but also decision makers’ revealed aversion of them. Since most natural prospects permit at least some inference, accounting for their degree improves prediction aversion. The special case full ambiguity, as in Ellsberg-type designs, is typically averted—yet many makers systematically like low d...

We establish when the two problems of minimizing a function of lifetime minimum wealth and of maximizing utility of lifetime consumption result in the same optimal investment strategy on a given open interval O in wealth space. To answer this question, we equate the two investment strategies and show that if the individual consumes at the same rate in both problems – the consumption rate is a c...

This note shows that for two inequality averse social welfare functions, if one is more inequality averse than the other, the household preference induced by optimally allocating aggregate bundles according to this social welfare function is more risk averse than the other. We present examples showing that this comparative static can be reversed if inequality aversion is dropped. We show that t...

We extend the Consumption-based CAPM (C-CAPM) model for representative agents with different risk attitudes. We introduce the concept of expectation dependence and show that for a risk averse representative agent, it is the first-degree expectation dependence rather than the covariance that determines C-CAPM’s riskiness. We extend the assumption of risk aversion to prudence and provide a weaker...

The question of why the unemployment rate takes a long time before it reverts back to its natural-rate following a negative exogenous shock has been the subject of unremitting interest in macroeconomics. This paper shows that the speed of adjustment to the steady-state unemployment and the degree of risk-aversion in firms are positively related. The reason is that risk-aversion in firms creates...

In this paper we examine how increases in intertemporal price uncertainty affect the welfare of a consumer. In the preference structure of the consumer the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) are parametrically independent. We find that under empirically plausible circumstances, for each given degree of risk aversion an increase in price ...