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World Income Components: Measuring and Exploiting Risk-Sharing Opportunities

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Abstract

We provide a method for decomposing the variance of changes in incomes in the world into components, world income components (WICs), in such a way as to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities among people of the world. We develop a constant absolute risk premium model, an intertemporal general equilibrium model of the world that facilitates consideration of optimal contract design. We show that for a contract designer maximizing a social welfare function, the optimal risk-management contracts maximize the equilibrium world real interest rate. That is the contract designer achieves the risk-optimal interest rate. We show that these WIC securities are defined in terms of eigenvectors of a transformed variance matrix of income changes. The method is applied with a variance matrix estimated using Penn World Table data on the G-7 countries, 1950-92.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefano G. Athanasoulis & Robert J. Shiller, 1999. "World Income Components: Measuring and Exploiting Risk-Sharing Opportunities," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1239, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1239
    Note: CFP 1029.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Constant Absolute Risk Premium; risk-optimal interest rate; three-level income model; WIC securities; contract design; macro markets; hedging;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F40 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - General
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets

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