There is a large literature estimating Arrow-Pratt coefficients of absolute and relative risk aversion. A striking feature of this literature is the very wide variation in the reported estimates of the coefficients. While there are often legitimate reasons for these differences in the estimates,...

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his wellbeing is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the...

To examine the relationship between early health status and financial decisions in adulthood, we link information on birth weight in 1966 from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort to data from the Finnish Central Securities Depository over the period of 1995-2010. We find that persons predisposed...

Estimates of agents' risk aversion dier between market studies and experimental studies. We demonstrate that the estimates can be reconciled through consistent treatment of agents' tendency for narrow framing, regarding integration of background wealth as well as across risky outcomes: Risk...

This note gives the conditions on preferences to guarantee the monotonicity of asset prices when the payoffs of the risky asset change in the sense of the Nth stochastic dominance and with an Nth degree increase in risk. Those conditions are expressed in terms of the sign of the successive...

Estimates of agents’ risk aversion differ between market studies and experimental studies. We demonstrate that these estimates can be reconciled through consistent treatment of agents’ propensity for narrow framing.