Relative Risk Aversion and Power-Law Distribution of Macroeconomic Disasters
The coefficient of relative risk aversion is notoriously difficult to estimate. Recently, Barro and Jin (On the size distribution of macroeconomic disasters, Econometrica 2011; 79(3): 434–455) have come up with a new estimation approach that fits a power-law model to the tail of distribution of macroeconomic disasters. We show that their results can be successfully replicated using a more refined power-law fitting methodology and a more comprehensive dataset. Copyright ©…