Stochastic Impatience and the Separation of Time and Risk Preferences

Economic and Decisions Science Department

Speaker : Daniel Gottlieb

from  London School of Economics

Room T022

Abstract :

“ We study how the separation of time and risk preferences relates to a behavioral property that generalizes impatience to stochastic environments: Stochastic Impatience. We show that, within a broad class of models, Stochastic Impatience holds if and only if risk aversion is not too high relative to the inverse of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. In particular, in the models of Epstein and Zin (1989) and Hansen and Sargent (1995), Stochastic Impatience is violated for all commonly used parameters.”