Publications [#141382] of Marc F Bellemare

Sanford Institute Working Papers

  1. M.F. Bellemare and Z.S. Brown. "On the (Mis)Use of Wealth as a Proxy for Risk Aversion."   (November, 2008). [papers.cfm]
    (last updated on 2008/11/14)

    Abstract:
    Empirical tests of risk sharing in the agricultural contracting literature often rely on wealth as a proxy for risk aversion. The intuition behind such tests is that since risk sharing is monotonic in the coefficients of risk aversion of the principal and the agent, and since these coefficients are themselves assumed to be monotonic in wealth, then the effect of a change in wealth on risk sharing is clearly identified. We show that, with a risk-averse principal and a risk-averse agent, or with a risk-neutral principal and a risk-averse agent, tests of risk sharing relying on wealth as a proxy for risk aversion are rarely identified.

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