FARM FINANCIAL STRUCTURE DECISIONS UNDER DIFFERENT INTERTEMPORAL RISK BEHAVIORAL CONSTRUCTS

An alternative unconstrained expected-utility maximization model of farm debt is developed using the location-scale parameter condition that incorporates the empirically validated hypotheses of decreasing absolute and constant relative risk aversion. Simulation-optimization results based on the old and new model versions provide interesting implications for various levels of risk aversion and initial equity investments.Risk and Uncertainty,

Liquidity Risk Aversion, Debt Maturity, and Current Account Surpluses: A Theory and Evidence from East Asia

The purpose of this paper is to show that macroeconomic impacts might be very different depending on what strategy developing countries will take. In the first part, we investigate what macroeconomic impacts an increased aversion to liquidity risk can have in a simple open economy model. When the government keeps foreign reserves constant, an increased aversion to liquidity risk reduces liquid debt and increases illiquid debt. However, its macroeconomic impacts are not large, causing only small current account surpluses. In contrast, when the government responds to the shock, the changed aversion increases foreign reserves and may lead to a rise of liquidity debt. In particular, under some reasonable parameter set, it causes large macroeconomic impacts, including significant current account surpluses. In the second part, we provide several empirical supports to the implications. In particular, we explore how foreign debt maturity structures changed in East Asia. We find that many East Asian economies reduced short-term borrowings temporarily after the crisis but increased short-term borrowings in the early 2000s. We discuss that our results have important implications for the recent deterioration in the U.S. current account.

The Equity Premium Puzzle and the Riskfree Rate Puzzle

This paper studies the implications for general equilibrium asset pricing of a class of Kreps-Porteus nonexpected utility preferences characterized by a constant intertemporal elasticity of substitution and a constant, but unrelated, coefficient of relative risk aversion. It is shown that relaxing the parametric restriction on tastes imposed by the time-additive expected utility specification does not suffice to solve the Mehra-Prescott (1985) equity premium puzzle. An additional puzzle — the risk-free rate puzzle — emerges instead: why is the risk-free rate so low if agents are so averse to intertemporal substitution

Measuring International Risk-Sharing: Theoretical Issues and Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries

Whether financial market integration raised global insurance is a crucial, still open issue. All empirical methods to measure cross-border risk-sharing are based on the implicit assumption that international prices do not fluctuate in response to business cycle shocks. This paper shows that these methods can be completely misleading in the presence of large fluctuations in international prices as those observed in the data. I then propose a new empirical method that is immune from this issue. The risk-sharing inefficiency between two countries is measured by the wedge between their Stochastic Discount Factors (SDFs). This measure is a proxy for the welfare losses created by imperfect insurance. Welfare losses can be attributed either to the strength of uninsurable shocks (the extent of risk to be pooled) or to the degree of insurance against different sources of risk. The method is applied to study the evolution of risk-sharing between the US and OECD countries, assuming either constant or time-varying risk-aversion. The degree of insurance is found to have improved over time only for some countries and only if SDFs are estimated assuming time-varying risk-aversion. The results are also informative on the implications of different macro models for international risk. When confronted with the data, standard open-macro models (featuring constant risk-aversion) imply that nominal exchange rate fluctuations do not contain wealth divergences across countries, but rather represent an important source of risk. Time-varying risk-aversion instead implies that limiting welfare losses from imperfect risk-sharing requires reducing the volatility of macro fundamentals.

An Experimental Test of Risk-Sharing Arrangements

We investigate risk sharing without commitment by designing an experiment to match a simple model of voluntary insurance between two agents when aggregate income is constant. Participants are matched in pairs. Each period, they receive their income with or without a random component h that one person receives; after observing own and counterpart income, each person in a pair can decide to make a transfer to the other person. It is common information that there is a given probability that all pairs will be dissolved at the end of each period, with participants re-matched. At the end of the experiment, one period is randomly drawn to count for cash payment. Participants all face the same variance in their income, but do not necessarily have the same mean income. This setting allows us to experimentally test different implications of risk sharing without commitment. In particular, we find strong evidence of risk sharing and reciprocal behavior, where transfers are higher with a higher continuation probability and with a higher degree of risk aversion. However, transfers are lower with inequality, in contrast with existing models of both risk sharing and social preferences.experiments, gift exchange, informal insurance, risk-sharing, social preferences