Wen-Jyh Chiu

After completing his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA, Henry joined the staff at Manchester in 1994 where he stays apart from a visiting appointment at Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, USA) in 1999.

Specific research interests:

Henry’s research interests include the economics of risk and insurance, the effect of income distribution on economic growth and the economics of crime.

Current research projects:

I have been working on a theory of risk aversion that assumes only utility-representable preferences and thus transcends the existing Expected Utility and Non-Expected Utility frameworks. This general framework can be further extended to consider practically all comparative statics problems involving decisions under risk. The second research project I am working on concerns the characterization of the overall risk changes induced by taking one financial risk in the presence of a non-financial background risk (such as health). While characterizing the effects of financial background risk on risk taking has been the subject of several prominent publications, the results concerning non-financial background risk in the existing literature are fairly limited in scope and generality. My preliminary investigation indicates that it is possible to fully characterize not only the effects of risk taking in the presence of non-financial background risk but also the degree of aversion to such risk changes.

Supervision areas:

Phd Students:

Waseem Toraubally