Measuring risk aversion with lists: a new bias

Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury (Am Econ Rev 92(5):1644–1655, 2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk aversion and scrambles the ranking of individuals by risk aversion. This bias, that we call embedding bias, is quite distinct from other confounds that have been previously observed in the use of the HL method. It may be related to empirical phenomena and theoretical developments where better prospects increase risk aversion. Nevertheless, we also find that the more recent elicitation method due to Abdellaoui et al. (Theory Decis 71:63–80, 2011), also based on lists but using only one and the same probability in the list, does not display any statistically significant bias when the corresponding items of the list are removed. Our results suggest that methods other than the popular HL one may be preferable for the measurement of risk aversion.     

HUMAN CAPITAL IN GROWTH REGRESSIONS: HOW MUCH DIFFERENCE DOES DATA QUALITY MAKE?

We construct estimates of educational attainment for a sample of 21 OECD countries. Our series incorporate previously unexploited information and remove sharp breaks in the data that can only reflect changes in classification criteria. We then construct indicators of the information content of our estimates and a number of previously available data sets and examine their performance in several growth specifications. We find a clear positive correlation between data quality and the size and significance of human capital coefficients in growth regressions. Using an extension of the classical errors in variables model to correct for measurement error bias, we construct a set of meta‐estimates of the coefficient of years of schooling in an aggregate Cobb‐Douglas production function. Our results suggest that the value of this parameter is likely to be above 0.60. (JEL: O40, I20, O30, C19)