We study comparative statics of Nth-degree risk increases within a large class of problems that involve bidimensional payoffs and additive or multiplicative risks. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous impact of Nth-degree risk increases on optimal decision making. We...

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...

This paper derives the properties of the discount rate that should be applied to a public-sector project when the affected population has heterogeneous degrees of impatience. We show that, for any distribution of discount rates, the social discount rate has the following properties: it decreases...

In this paper we analyse the risk attitude of a group of heterogenous agents and we develop a theory of comparative collective risk tolerance. In particular, we characterize how shifts in the distribution of individual levels of risk tolerance affect the representative agent's degree of risk...

We study comparative statics of Nth-degree risk increases, as de ned by Ekern (1980), within a large class of problems that involve bidimensional payoffs and additive or multiplicative risks. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous impact of Nth-degree risk increases on...