Journal of Political Economy Vol. 119 No. 5 2011
Heterogeneity and Tests of Risk Sharing
Abstract
How well do people share risk? Standard risk-sharing regressions assume that any variation in households’ risk preferences is uncorrelated with variation in the cyclicality of income. I combine administrative and survey data to show that this assumption is questionable: Risk-tolerant workers hold jobs in which earnings carry more aggregate risk. The correlation makes risk-sharing regressions in the previous literature too pessimistic. I derive techniques that eliminate the bias, apply them to U.S. data, and find that the effect of idiosyncratic income shocks on consumption is practically small and statistically difficult to distinguish from zero.
- DOI
- 10.1086/662720
- Volume
- 119
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 925-958
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref