Risk Aversion Wealth And Background Risk

Provides a detailed discussion of the adjustment of risk references and how to go about making such adjustments to a common scale. By adjusting all information to this common scale, results across studies can be easily summarized and compared, and the body of information concerning risk aversion can be examined as a whole

Economic and financial research on insurance markets has undergone dramatic growth since its infancy in the early 1960s. Our main objective in compiling this volume was to achieve a wider dissemination of key papers in this literature. Their significance is highlighted in the introduction, which surveys major areas in insurance economics. While it was not possible to provide comprehensive coverage of insurance economics in this book, these readings provide an essential foundation to those who desire to conduct research and teach in the field. In particular, we hope that this compilation and our introduction will be useful to graduate students and to researchers in economics, finance, and insurance. Our criteria for selecting articles included significance, representativeness, pedagogical value, and our desire to include theoretical and empirical work. While the focus of the applied papers is on property-liability insurance, they illustrate issues, concepts, and methods that are applicable in many areas of insurance. The S. S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School made this book possible by financing publication costs. We are grateful for this assistance and to J. David Cummins, Executive Director of the Foundation, for his efforts and helpful advice on the contents. We also wish to thank all of the authors and editors who provided permission to reprint articles and our respective institutions for technical and financial support.

An understanding of risk and how to deal with it is an essential part of modern economics. Whether liability litigation for pharmaceutical firms or an individual's having insufficient wealth to retire, risk is something that can be recognized, quantified, analyzed, treated--and incorporated into our decision-making processes. This book represents a concise summary of basic multiperiod decision-making under risk. Its detailed coverage of a broad range of topics is ideally suited for use in advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate courses either as a self-contained text, or the introductory chapters combined with a selection of later chapters can represent core reading in courses on macroeconomics, insurance, portfolio choice, or asset pricing. The authors start with the fundamentals of risk measurement and risk aversion. They then apply these concepts to insurance decisions and portfolio choice in a one-period model. After examining these decisions in their one-period setting, they devote most of the book to a multiperiod context, which adds the long-term perspective most risk management analyses require. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevant literature and a set of problems. The book presents a thoroughly accessible introduction to risk, bridging the gap between the traditionally separate economics and finance literatures.

In this paper, we indicate that risk vulnerability can be associated with the concept of downside risk aversion (DRA) and an assumption about its behavior, namely that it is decreasing in wealth. Specifically, decreasing downside risk aversion in the Arrow-Pratt and Ross senses are respectively necessary and sufficient for a background risk to raise the aversion to other independent risks.

Updates and advances the theory of expected utility as applied to risk analysis and financial decision making.

We consider the demand for state contingent claims in the presence of a zero-mean, non-hedgeable background risk. An agent is defined to be generalized risk averse if he/she reacts to an increase in background risk by choosing a demand function for contingent claims with a smaller slope. We show that the conditions for standard risk aversion: positive, declining absolute risk aversion and prudence are necessary and sufficient for generalized risk aversion. We also derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the agent's derived risk aversion to increase with a simple increase in background risk.

If risk aversion and willingness to take on risk are driven by emotions and we as humans are bad at correctly identifying them, the finance profession has a serious challenge at hand—how to reliably identify the individual risk profile of a retail investor or high-net-worth individual. In this series of CFA Institute Research Foundation briefs, we have asked academics and practitioners to summarize the current state of knowledge about risk profiling in different key areas.