Stochastic Impatience and the Separation of Time and Risk Preferences
40 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2018 Last revised: 12 Aug 2021
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Stochastic Impatience and the Separation of Time and Risk Preferences
Stochastic Impatience and the Separation of Time and Risk Preferences
Date Written: July 5, 2020
Abstract
We study how the separation between time and risk preferences relates to a new behavioral property that generalizes impatience to stochastic environments: Stochastic Impatience. We show that Stochastic Impatience holds if and only if risk aversion is \not too high" relative to the inverse elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This result has implications for many known models. For example, in the models of Epstein and Zin (1989) and Hansen and Sargent (1995), Stochastic Impatience is violated for all commonly used parameters. If Stochastic Impatience is taken normatively, this suggests a limit on the amount of separation between time and risk preference; otherwise, it provides a simple one-question test for it.
Keywords: Stochastic Impatience, Epstein and Zin preferences, Separation of Risk and Time preferences, Risk Sensitive Preferences, Non-Expected Utility
JEL Classification: D81, D90, G11, E7
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation