Risk Aversion and Power-Law Distribution of Macroeconomic Disasters

The coefficient of relative risk aversion (CRRA) is notoriously difficult to estimate. Recently, Barro and Jin (On the size distribution of macroeconomic disasters, Econometrica 2011; 79(3): 434–455) have come up with a new estimation approach that fits a power-law model to the tail of distribution of macroeconomic disasters. We show that their results can be successfully replicated using a more refined power-law fitting methodology and a more comprehensive data set