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An Empirical Analysis of Risk Aversion and Income Growth
Abstract
Risk aversion enters many theoretical models of human capital investment, but attitudes toward risk have not been incorporated in empirical models of human capital investment. This article develops a model of the joint investment in financial wealth and human wealth to show that human capital investment is an inverse function of the degree of relative risk aversion. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that wage growth is positively correlated with preferences for risk taking. More-educated individuals are also more likely to be risk takers, thus risk taking explains a portion of the returns to education.
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Citations
Cited by
Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?
Malmendier, U., & Nagel, S. (2011) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjq004 · Cited by 2,480
Financial Risk Tolerance and Additional Factors That Affect Risk Taking in Everyday Money Matters
Grable, J. E. (2000) · Journal of Business and Psychology · doi:10.1023/a:1022994314982 · Cited by 471
Metadata
- Authors
- Shaw, K. L.
- Venue
- Journal of Labor Economics
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1996-10
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 626-653
- ISSN
- 0734-306X (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5307
- OpenAlex
- W2007101833
- Cited by
- 292
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 7.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Shaw, K. L. (1996). An Empirical Analysis of Risk Aversion and Income Growth. Journal of Labor Economics. https://doi.org/10.1086/209825
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
