This study used a three-year panel dataset for 350 Malawian farm households to examine the potential for widespread adoption of drought tolerant (DT) maize varieties, a technology that holds considerable promise for helping smallholder farmers in SSA adapt to drought risk. Regression results...

We address the issue of risk aversion in a competitive equilibrium when some buyers engage in learning and information is conveyed through the price system. Specifically, since the learning process yields uncertainty, we study the effect of risk aversion on the equilibrium outcomes of the model,...

One of the standard predictions of the agency theory is that more incentives can be given to agents with lower risk aversion. In this paper we show that this relationship may be absent or reversed when the technology is endogenous and projects with a higher e¢ ciency are also riskier. Using a...

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II. Part I is concerned with Decision Making...

In this paper, we consider an oligopolistic industry composed of two groups (or classes) of firms? owners producing differentiated goods. In one group, owners have a controlling power from which they can extract private benefits but the managers oppose them. In another group, owners are not...

Cressy (2000) argues that the positive correlation between assets and the rate of business startups is due to DARA preferences. We show however that the required property is prudence,and prudence is consistent with DARA, IARA or CARA.

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

This paper defines the rate of substitution of one stochastic change to a random variable for another. It then focuses on the case where one of these changes is an nth degree risk increase, and the other is an mth degree risk increase, where nm⩾1. The paper shows that the rate of substitution...

Oliver Hart proved the impossibility of deriving general comparative static properties in portfolio weights. Instead, we derive new comparative statics for the distribution of payoffs: A is less risk averse than B iff Aʼs payoff is always distributed as Bʼs payoff plus a non-negative random...

There exist several characterizations of concavity for univariate functions. One of them states that a function is concave if and only if it has nonincreasing differences. This definition provides a natural generalization of concavity for multivariate functions called inframodularity....