The Risk Element in Occupational and Educational Choices: Comment
The Risk Element in Occupational and Educational Choices: Comment
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职业和教育选择中的风险因素：评论
DOI：
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发表时间：
1974
影响因子：
8.2
通讯作者：
John C. Hause
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
John C. Hause
In an interesting recent contribution, Weiss (1972) concludes that "moderate" degrees of risk aversion substantially reduce the average rates of return from educational investment. This conclusion depends critically on the maximand for the consumer assumed by Weiss, which is antiFisherian with a vengeance. The purpose of this note is to indicate more explicitly the role played by the utility functional specified by Weiss in leading to his conclusion, and to suggest an alternative procedure that may be preferred by economists addicted to traditional capital theory. The two main results of the analysis are (a) that the original Weiss formulation is theoretically inappropriate for dealing with the problem at hand and (b) that the empirical result obtained by Weiss that moderate risk aversion greatly reduces the schooling returns to Ph.D. recipients is unjustified. That conclusion is primarily due to the foreseen absence of earnings while attending school, not to risk. The empirical discussion is also flawed by ignoring how the covariance structure of earnings over time must be taken into account in the empirical estimation of risk. Weiss (1972, p. 1208) assumes that consumers attempt to maximize expected discounted utility
