IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joecth/v68y2019i1d10.1007_s00199-018-1112-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Risk sharing contracts with private information and one-sided commitment

Author

Listed:
  • Eduardo Zilberman

    (Central Bank of Chile)

  • Vinicius Carrasco

    (PUC-Rio)

  • Pedro Hemsley

    (UERJ)

Abstract

In a repeated unobserved endowment economy in which agents negotiate long-term contracts with a financial intermediary, we study the risk sharing implications of the interaction between incentive compatibility constraints (due to private information) and participation constraints (due to one-sided commitment). In particular, we assume that after a default episode, agents consume their endowment and remain in autarky forever. We find that once they are away from autarky today, if the probability of drawing the highest possible endowment shock is sufficiently small, the optimal contract prevents agents from reaching autarky tomorrow and, thus, from being “impoverished.” Moreover, an invariant cross-sectional distribution of lifetime utilities (or values) exists. A numerical example shows that the mass of agents living in autarky can be zero in the limit.

Suggested Citation

  • Eduardo Zilberman & Vinicius Carrasco & Pedro Hemsley, 2019. "Risk sharing contracts with private information and one-sided commitment," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 68(1), pages 53-81, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:joecth:v:68:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s00199-018-1112-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s00199-018-1112-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00199-018-1112-1
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00199-018-1112-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Phelan, Christopher, 1998. "On the Long Run Implications of Repeated Moral Hazard," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 79(2), pages 174-191, April.
    2. Ethan Ligon & Jonathan P. Thomas & Tim Worrall, 2002. "Informal Insurance Arrangements with Limited Commitment: Theory and Evidence from Village Economies," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 69(1), pages 209-244.
    3. Doepke, Matthias & Townsend, Robert M., 2006. "Dynamic mechanism design with hidden income and hidden actions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 235-285, January.
    4. Cheng Wang, 1995. "Dynamic Insurance with Private Information and Balanced Budgets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 62(4), pages 577-595.
    5. Emmanuel Farhi & Iván Werning, 2007. "Inequality and Social Discounting," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(3), pages 365-402.
    6. Atkeson Andrew & Lucas Jr. , Robert E., 1995. "Efficiency and Equality in a Simple Model of Efficient Unemployment Insurance," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 66(1), pages 64-88, June.
    7. Tian, Guoqiang & Zhang, Yuzhe, 2013. "When can we do better than autarky?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 119(3), pages 328-331.
    8. Tobias Broer & Marek Kapicka & Paul Klein, 2017. "Consumption Risk Sharing with Private Information and Limited Enforcement," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 23, pages 170-190, January.
    9. Jonathan Thomas & Tim Worrall, 1988. "Self-Enforcing Wage Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 55(4), pages 541-554.
    10. Paul Milgrom & Ilya Segal, 2002. "Envelope Theorems for Arbitrary Choice Sets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(2), pages 583-601, March.
    11. Dirk Krueger & Fabrizio Perri, 2006. "Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(1), pages 163-193.
    12. Cheng Wang, 2005. "Dynamic costly state verification," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 25(4), pages 887-916, June.
    13. Fernandes, Ana & Phelan, Christopher, 2000. "A Recursive Formulation for Repeated Agency with History Dependence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 223-247, April.
    14. Thomas, Jonathan & Worrall, Tim, 1990. "Income fluctuation and asymmetric information: An example of a repeated principal-agent problem," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 367-390, August.
    15. Krueger, Dirk & Perri, Fabrizio, 2011. "Public versus private risk sharing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(3), pages 920-956, May.
    16. Sevin Yeltekin & Christopher Sleet, 2001. "Dynamic labor contracts with temporary layoffs and permanent separations," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 18(1), pages 207-235.
    17. Ales, Laurence & Maziero, Pricila & Yared, Pierre, 2014. "A theory of political and economic cycles," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 153(C), pages 224-251.
    18. Attanasio, Orazio & Rios-Rull, Jose-Victor, 2000. "Consumption smoothing in island economies: Can public insurance reduce welfare?," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(7), pages 1225-1258, June.
    19. Kehoe, Timothy J & Levine, David K, 2001. "Liquidity Constrained Markets versus Debt Constrained Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(3), pages 575-598, May.
    20. Laczó, Sarolta, 2014. "Does risk sharing increase with risk aversion and risk when commitment is limited?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 237-251.
    21. Ljungqvist, Lars & Sargent, Thomas J., 2012. "Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, Third Edition," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 3, volume 1, number 0262018748, December.
    22. Tobias Broer & Marek Kapicka & Paul Klein, 2017. "Consumption Risk Sharing with Private Information and Limited Enforcement," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 23, pages 170-190, January.
    23. Karine Gobert & Michel Poitevin, 2006. "Non-commitment and savings in dynamic risk-sharing contracts," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 28(2), pages 357-372, June.
    24. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 1996. "Implications of Efficient Risk Sharing without Commitment," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(4), pages 595-609.
    25. Phelan Christopher, 1995. "Repeated Moral Hazard and One-Sided Commitment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 488-506, August.
    26. Marcus M. Opp & John Y. Zhu, 2015. "Impatience versus Incentives," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83(4), pages 1601-1617, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Grochulski, Borys & Zhang, Yuzhe, 2023. "Termination as an incentive device," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 18(1), January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Golosov, M. & Tsyvinski, A. & Werquin, N., 2016. "Recursive Contracts and Endogenously Incomplete Markets," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 725-841, Elsevier.
    2. Karaivanov, Alexander K. & Martin, Fernando M., 2018. "Markov-perfect risk sharing, moral hazard and limited commitment," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 1-23.
    3. Eduardo Zilberman & Pedro Hemsley, 2015. "Risk Contracts with Private Information and One-Sided Commitment," Textos para discussão 635, Department of Economics PUC-Rio (Brazil).
    4. Jean Guillaume Forand & Jan Zapal, 2017. "The Demand and Supply of Favours in Dynamic Relationships," Working Papers 1705, University of Waterloo, Department of Economics, revised Sep 2017.
    5. Andrew Clausen & Carlo Strub, 2012. "Envelope theorems for non-smooth and non-concave optimization," ECON - Working Papers 062, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
    6. Alexander Karaivanov & Fernando Martin, 2015. "Dynamic Optimal Insurance and Lack of Commitment," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 18(2), pages 287-305, April.
    7. Zhao, Rui R., 2007. "Dynamic risk-sharing with two-sided moral hazard," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 601-640, September.
    8. Alexander Karaivanov, 2021. "Blockchains, Collateral and Financial Contracts," Discussion Papers dp21-03, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.
    9. Krueger, Dirk & Perri, Fabrizio, 2011. "Public versus private risk sharing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(3), pages 920-956, May.
    10. Tim Worrall & Alessia Russo & Francesco Lancia, 2017. "Sustainable Intergenerational Insurance," 2017 Meeting Papers 319, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    11. Tobias Broer, 2009. "Stationary equilibrium distributions in economies with limited commitment," Economics Working Papers ECO2009/39, European University Institute.
    12. Krueger, Dirk & Uhlig, Harald, 2022. "Neoclassical Growth with Long-Term One-Sided Commitment Contracts," CEPR Discussion Papers 17757, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    13. Dirk Krueger & Harald Uhlig, 2024. "Neoclassical Growth with Limited Commitment," PIER Working Paper Archive 22-023, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.
    14. Sarolta Laczo, 2010. "Estimating Dynamic Contracts: Risk Sharing in Village Economies," 2010 Meeting Papers 687, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Alex Bloedel & R. Vijay Krishna & Oksana Leukhina, 2018. "Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information," Working Papers 2018-020, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised 12 Dec 2021.
    16. Wang, Cheng, 2011. "Termination of dynamic contracts in an equilibrium labor market model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(1), pages 74-110, January.
    17. Miao, Jianjun & Zhang, Yuzhe, 2015. "A duality approach to continuous-time contracting problems with limited commitment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 159(PB), pages 929-988.
    18. Krueger, Dirk & Uhlig, Harald, 2006. "Competitive risk sharing contracts with one-sided commitment," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 1661-1691, October.
    19. Árpád Ábrahám & Sarolta Laczó, 2018. "Efficient Risk Sharing with Limited Commitment and Storage," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(3), pages 1389-1424.
    20. Borys Grochulski & Yuzhe Zhang, 2017. "Market‐Based Incentives," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 58(2), pages 331-382, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Risk sharing contracts; private information; One-sided commitment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:joecth:v:68:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s00199-018-1112-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.