Household Portfolios and Implicit Risk Aversion

Relatore:  Alessandro Bucciol - Universita' di Verona
  lunedì 16 marzo 2009 alle ore 13.00 Biblioteca DSE c/o Palazzina 32 (Ex Caserma Passalacqua)

We derive from a sample of US households the distribution of the risk aversion implicit in their portfolio choice. Our estimate minimizes the distance between the certainty equivalent return generated with observed portfolios and portfolios that are optimal in a mean-variance framework. Taking into account real wealth and constraints in portfolio composition, we obtain a median risk aversion coefficient of 2.7 and observe substantial heterogeneity across households. Our analysis informs that risk aversion reduces with wealth and education, and increases with age. Disregarding real wealth and constraints, our estimates are markedly larger and the direction of the above correlations differs.  The inferred optimization bias is small, especially with over-simplified portfolios.
 

Titolo Formato  (Lingua, Dimensione, Data pubblicazione)
paper  pdfpdf (it, 184 KB, 16/03/09)

Referente
Angelo Zago

Referente esterno
Data pubblicazione
22 gennaio 2009

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