Although risk aversion has been used in economic models for over 275 years, the past few decades have shown how higher order risk attitudes are also quite important. A behavioral approach to defining such risk attitudes was developed by Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006), based upon simple lottery...

This paper adopts a normative approach to catastrophe insurance.

This paper shows how financial contracts might be redesigned to allow for banks to manage the idiosyncratic component for their own accounts.

High correlations between risks can increase required insurer capital and/orreduce the availability of insurance. For such insurance lines, securitizationis rapidly emerging as an alternative form of risk transfer. The ultimatesuccess of securitization in replacing or complementing traditional...

We examine asset prices in a representative-agent model of general equilibrium. Assuming only that individuals are risk averse, we determine conditions on the changes in asset risk that are both necessary and sufficient for the asset price to fall. We show that these conditions neither imply,...

We consider a competitive insurance market with adverse selection. Unlike the standard models, we assume that individuals receive the benefit of some type of potential government assistance that guarantees them a minimum level of wealth. For example, this assistance might be some type of...

Decisions under risk are often multidimensional, where the preferences of the decision maker depend on several attributes. For example, an individual might be concerned about both her level of wealth and the condition of her health. Many times the signs of successive cross derivatives of a...

How does risk affect saving? Empirical work typically examines the effects of detectible differences in risk within the data. How these differences affect saving in theoretical models depends on the metric one uses for risk. For labor-income risk, second-degree increases in risk require prudence...

Consider a simple two-state risk with equal probabilities for the two states. In particular, assume that the random wealth variable Xi dominates Yi via ith-order stochastic dominance for i = M,N. We show that the 50-50 lottery [XN + YM, YN + XM] dominates the lottery [XN + XM, YN + YM] via (N +...