The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

In his basic model of debt renegotiation, BESTER [1994] argues that collateral is more effective if high risk projects are financed. This result, however, crucially depends on the definition of risk. Using the second-order stochastic dominance criterion introduced by ROTHSCHILD AND STIGLITZ...

In this paper we propose a new measure of vulnerability called vulnerability to downside risk. The relevant benchmark for this new measure is the current level of wellbeing of a household as opposed to another benchmark such as the poverty line. We argue that this measure adds complementary...

In this paper we propose an approach to vulnerability called perceived vulnerability to downside risk. We argue that the other concepts of vulnerability, though partially adhering to the focus axiom, do not exclusively consider downside risks in their measures. The reason for this is that most...

Which role do individual income prospects play in the decision to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee? In a model of occupational choice, higher expected after-tax earnings attract people to self-employment, while more risky net earnings deter risk-averse individuals. In this paper I...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how robustly they explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

The importance of risk management increases as farmers become more exposed to risk. But risk management is a difficult topic because income risk is the result of the complex interaction of multiple risk factors combined with the effect of an increasing array of possible risk management tools. In...

Which role do individual income prospects play in the decision to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee? In a model of occupational choice, higher expected after-tax earnings attract people to self-employment, while more risky net earnings deter risk-averse individuals. In this paper I...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Speci?cally, if the value of the...

The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...