Kimball, 1990a and Kimball, 1990b established that income risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only if absolute prudence decreases. We characterize decreasing and increasing multivariate prudence and show that a multidimensional risk increases the marginal propensity to...

In order to improve financial access to complementary health insurance (CHI) in France, a CHI voucher program, called Aide Complémentaire Santé (ACS) was introduced in 2005. Four years later, the program covered only 18% of the eligible population. Two main hypotheses are put forward to...

With population ageing in a changing PAYG system context, our aim is to identify whether households take into account a retirement risk in their global accumulation behaviour. We define the retirement risk as a long term revenue risk linked with changes in the generosity of the PAYG system. We...

The rise in life expectancy increases the likelihood that the proportion of the population living to an age at which their means will be exceeded and exposes the states and numerous institutions to an important longevity risk. The stakes are the optimal management of this social risk. Economic...

We consider a formal approach to comparative risk aversion and apply it to intertemporal choice models. This makes it possible to investigate whether standard classes of utility functions, such as those inspired from Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974), Selden (1978), Epstein and Zin (1989) or Quiggin...

This study develops three heuristics to measure financial optimism: financial expectation, a priori optimism, and a posteriori optimism. This paper finds that financial optimism has a significant positive effect on risk taking behaviour. Optimistic investors choose risky portfolios over...