Idiosyncratic Income Shocks Research Articles

Financial Literacy and Risk Protection During the Covid-19 Pandemic

AbstractThis study documents that competent access to financial markets can smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic income shocks. Using household-level data on financial literacy and financial resilience in Italy during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we find that financial literacy and financial asset ownership both influenced consumption changes in theoretically sensible ways. The results are robust in specifications controlling for several socio-demographic characteristics, saving choices, public transfers, and to different estimation methods.

Efficient risk sharing and separation

This paper extends the model of risk sharing with limited commitment to feature separation. Partners face idiosyncratic income and match quality shocks, share risk subject to limited commitment, and separate whenever they are better off doing so. We characterise analytically the sets of shock realisations where constrained-efficient separations occur and the dynamics of consumption while the risk-sharing partnership continues. The separation probability typically jumps as parameter values change continuously, and an additional inefficient equilibrium emerges. A key reason is complementarity between risk sharing and staying together today and in the future. Income inequality affects consumption inequality via its effect on separations, and consumption inequality can optimally exceed income inequality for any history of income realisations. Both partial risk sharing and separation are relevant for many applications, including the interaction between partners in a household and countries in an economic union.

Financial intermediation and efficient risk sharing in two-period lived OLG models

This article investigates a two-period lived overlapping-generations (OLG) model that incorporates financial intermediation. A risk-neutral bank offers loan and deposit contracts that insure risk-averse agents against idiosyncratic income shocks. Agents prefer financial intermediation to capital markets if it provides efficient risk sharing. The analysis demonstrates that in any two-period lived OLG model in which productive capital is increasing in investment levels, financial intermediation, when implemented for the purpose of efficient risk sharing, cannot instigate business cycles or complex dynamics. The resulting dynamics is monotonic and qualitatively indistinguishable from the dynamics of the classical OLG model by Diamond (Am Econ Rev 55(5):1126–1150, 1965). Business cycles may only occur if banks offer inefficient contracts. Efficient contracts will, in general, not induce dynamically efficient growth paths.

Consumption Smoothing in the Working-Class Households of Interwar Japan

I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic income shocks at that time, they mitigated fluctuations in indispensable consumption during economic hardship. In terms of risk-coping mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that savings institutions helped mitigate vulnerabilities and that both using borrowing institutions and adjusting labor supply served as risk-coping strategies among households with less savings.

Сценарная оценка макроэкономических эффектов прогрессивного налогообложения в России

The purpose of the study is to assess the impact of alternative options of progressive taxation on Russia’s macroeconomic performance. For quantitative assessments, a neoclassical general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households subject to idiosyncratic income shocks was used. Three groups of scenarios were analyzed, setting a threshold progressive tax scale with thresholds of 30, 50, and 70 thousand rubles, under which state income tax revenues (1) grow, (2) remain unchanged, and (3) decline. The maximum personal income tax rate in the analyzed scenarios was 25%. Steady states and transitions were calculated for the scenarios. According to the quantitative estimates, the first reform leads to a loss of 0.3% to 1.3% of GDP in the long run, depending on the assumed rates and threshold. Despite the increase in lump-sum transfers, aggregate household consumption decreases by 0.5–1.7% in all cases. The second reform leads to a loss of 0.2% to 0.6% of GDP in the long run. The third reform leads to insignificant fluctuations of GDP within 0.1%: GDP increases at the threshold of 30 thousand rubles and decreases at other thresholds. The scale of inequality reduction, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increases with an increase in the top tax rate. However, as the threshold increases, the depth of the Gini index reduction first increases and then decreases. In the short run, there is upward pressure on wages and prices. This is because a decrease in labor supply with unchanged capital in the short run leads to an increase in wage rates (a shift along the labor demand curve), and an increase in wage rates means an increase in marginal costs for firms, leading to higher prices.

Does financial inclusion promote consumption smoothing? Evidence from emerging and developing economies

An important issue for emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) is how to reduce the occurrence of hand-to-mouth consumption by allowing consumption smoothing. Financial inclusion increases access to the formal banking system and financial markets, and allows households to use more appropriate financial instruments, which should enable them to diversify consumption, disrupting the connection to idiosyncratic income shocks. This paper empirically investigates whether financial inclusion can smooth consumption and promote risk sharing for a large heterogenous sample of 85 EMDEs for 1995 to 2017. We find that financial inclusion decreases the volatility of consumption and reduces deviations in country consumption vs world consumption. Curiously, we find that financial inclusion does not help countries improve risk sharing by lowering their exposure to idiosyncratic output shocks. We further find that risk sharing through domestic credit markets expands with financial inclusion, although it does not appear to reduce unsmoothed consumption.

Inequality and Asset Fire Sales

It is widely acknowledged that fire sales were a critical factor in inducing and exacerbating the financial crises of 2007--2008. The leverage of financial intermediaries, which is defined as the ratio of total assets to capital, is a key factor in causing fire sales. Why do financial intermediaries expand their balance sheets despite subsequently having to sell their assets at discounted prices? To examine this question, we incorporate financial intermediaries into a three-period incomplete market economy model, in which households face countercyclical and uninsured idiosyncratic income shocks. We demonstrate that countercyclical income inequality and market incompleteness result in leveraged investment and subsequent asset fire sales by financial intermediaries in equilibrium. The first contribution of this paper is that we demonstrate that the mechanism between asset prices and leverages could successfully solve the famed asset-pricing puzzles. The second contribution is that we analyze the impact of financial regulation on the welfare of ex ante homogeneous households.

Efficiency Versus Insurance: Capital Income Taxation and Privatizing Social Security

We study the interactions between capital income tax and social security privatization in the context of rising longevity. In an economy with idiosyncratic income shocks, redistributive defined benefit social security provides some insurance against income uncertainty. This insurance comes at the expense of efficiency loss due to labor supply distortions. The existing view in the literature states that reducing this distortion by introducing (partially funded) defined contribution social security would reduce welfare because the loss of insurance and the transitory fiscal gap dominate the efficiency gains. However, prior research financed the transitory costs of the reform by taxing consumption. We show that in the context of longevity, capital income taxation provides a superior alternative: welfare gains are sufficient to outweigh the loss of insurance and transitory fiscal gap. We provide explanations for a mechanism behind this result and we reconcile our results with the earlier literature.

Countercyclical Labor Income Risk and Portfolio Choices over the Life Cycle

Abstract I estimate a life cycle model of portfolio choices that incorporates the relationship between market returns and the skewness of idiosyncratic income shocks. The cyclicality of skewness can explain (a) low stock market participation among young households, (b) why the equity share of participants slightly increases until retirement, and (c) why renters invest less in stocks than do homeowners. With a relative risk aversion of 6 and yearly participation cost of $250, the model matches the evolution of wealth, participation, and conditional equity shares over the life cycle. Nevertheless, cyclical skewness increases the equity premium by at most 0.5 percentage points. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Sharing idiosyncratic risk even though prices are “wrong”

We design an infinite-horizon dynamic asset market experiment with perishable consumption and a long-lived asset where gains from trade originate from individuals experiencing idiosyncratic income shocks. Our study is based on the consumption-based general equilibrium theory (Lucas (1978)). The presence of traders having induced motive to smooth consumption is not sufficient to eliminate price bubbles. Despite the asset being consistently priced higher than the equilibrium price, traders are able to share idiosyncratic risk and attain higher welfare. The co-existence of traders with income shocks along with those having no induced motive to trade does not hinder in the former smoothing their consumption stream. Our results hold for markets with and without aggregate risk.

CO-MOVEMENT OF STEADY-STATE GOVERNMENT DEBT AND HOUSEHOLD DEBT

To understand whether and how movements of government debt and household debt are related, stationary equilibrium government debt and household debt are characterized in a politico-economic model where office-seeking policymakers decide government debt and individual voters can borrow facing uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. An increase in uninsurable income risk unconditionally raises stationary equilibrium government debt and aggregate household debt together, while an increase in household-loan collateral value or population aging conditionally does so, entailing positive correlations between these two debts’ movements. In contrast, an increase in interest rate conditionally causes these two debts to move in the opposite directions.

External Shocks, Household Consumption and Fertility in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of idiosyncratic income shocks on household consumption,educational expenditure and fertility in Indonesia, and assesses whether the investment inhuman capital of children and fertility are used to smooth household consumption. Usingsix different kinds of self-reported economic hardships, our findings indicate that copingmechanisms are rather efficient for Indonesian households that perceive an economichardship. Only in case of unemployment we find a significant decrease in consumptionspending and educational expenditure while fertility increases. Theses results indicate thathouseholds that perceive an unemployment shock use children as a means for smoothingconsumption. Regarding the death of a household member or natural disaster we find thatconsumption even increases. These results are consistent with the argument that copingmechanisms even over-compensate the actual consumption loss due to an economichardship. One important lesson from our findings is that different types of income shockmay lead to different economic and demographic behavioral adjustments and thereforerequire specific targeted social insurance programs.

Marginal Propensities to Consume Before and After the Great Recession

Using a quasi maximum likelihood approach for a semi-structural model, we find highly precise and distinct estimates of consumption responses to idiosyncratic income shocks for different groups of households. Homeowners stratified by liquid wealth exhibit the most dispersion in their marginal propensities to consume. Time-varying estimates support strong patterns of heterogeneity by homeownership status and balance sheet liquidity, with economically and statistically significant increases in the sensitivity of transitory consumption for homeowners, especially those with lower liquid wealth, following the collapse in house prices with the Great Recession. These findings support consumption theories that include housing as an illiquid asset.

Bailouts, Inflation, and Risk-Sharing in Monetary Unions

This paper presents a new rationalization for bailouts of sovereign debt in monetary unions, such as those observed during the recent Euro crisis. It introduces a model where member countries of the monetary union are ex-ante identical, and each derives utility from consumption and disutility from the union-wide inflation rate. The union’s central bank is utilitarian and lacks commitment. Countries borrow or save in a market for nominal sovereign debt in response to idiosyncratic income shocks, with countries that receive positive income shocks saving and countries that receive negative income shocks borrowing. Ex post, the monetary union’s central bank will attempt to devalue sovereign debt through surprise inflation, as this will redistribute income from rich creditor countries to poor debtor countries. Creditor countries choose to bailout debtor countries because bailouts will weaken the redistributive motives of the central bank and forestall surprise inflation. As bailouts in this environment constitute a payment from lucky creditor countries to unlucky debtor countries, they mimic a risk-sharing arrangement that insures against income shocks. The payments made by creditor countries are incentive-compatible due to the shared currency and inflation rate in the monetary union. This ability of countries to provide each other with incentive-compatible insurance constitutes a novel theory of optimal currency areas. This insurance benefit of the monetary union is largest for countries with negatively correlated income shocks, in contrast to the classic Mundell-Friedman optimal currency area criterion.

Demand for insurance and within-kin-group marriages: Evidence from a West-African country

We ask whether parents have incentives to marry their children to a member of the kin group in order to better insure against adverse idiosyncratic income shocks. Exploiting original panel data from a household survey collected in Senegal in 2006/2007 and 2011/2012, we find that daughters' within-kin-group marriage helps their parents' household to better smooth food consumption when a parent has fallen ill. This better smoothing is notably driven by the fact that households having married a daughter within the kin group receive relatively more transfers. Our results indicate that parents’ demand for insurance can explain part of their demand for marrying within the kin group their daughter and extend the literature on inter-linkages between marriage decisions and demand for insurance.

Dynamic effects of consumption tax reforms with durable consumption

Abstract This paper introduces durables into a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generation model with idiosyncratic income shocks and endogenous borrowing constraints, which depend on durables. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare effects of consumption tax reforms in a richer model that captures the difference between nondurable and durable consumption. When durables are considered, the standard results that a shift to consumption taxes is welfare improving are overturned. The mechanism of this opposing result is that consumption tax makes durable consumption more expensive without relaxing the borrowing constraint. The inability of borrowing to insure against income risk deviates the economy further away from market completeness and particularly hurts young and poor households. As a result, welfare decreases, coupled with negative redistribution.

(S)Cars and the Great Recession

In this paper we consider how car purchases behaviour changes at the onset and during a recession. In particular, by using the rich information available in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we look both at the number of individuals buying a car, and at the size of the car they buy. We show that the behaviour during the great recession of 2008-2010 is remarkably different from previous recessions. We interpret the evidence through the prism of a life cycle model where individuals receive idiosyncratic uninsurable income as well as aggregate income shocks and stochastic borrowing constraints. Households allocate their resources between cars and non durable consumption. Cars are large and costly to transact but can be financed through car loans. This implies an (S,s) type of durables adjustment. We show that, because of their salience and the transaction costs, cars are particularly sensitive to changes in the perception of future expected in come and its variability. We show that persistent common income shocks explain the consumption data better than changes in borrowing constraints and idiosyncratic income shocks.

Endogenous Partial Insurance and Inequality

We show that the transition from an economy characterized by idiosyncratic income shocks and incomplete markets a la Aiyagari (1994) to markets where state-contingent assets are available but costly (in order to purchase a contingent asset, households have to pay a fixed participation cost) leads to a large increase of wealth inequality. Using a standard calibration our model can match a Gini of 0.93 close to the level of wealth inequality observed in the US. In addition, under this level of participation costs, wealth inequality is particularly sensitive to income inequality. We label this phenomenon as the Inequality Accelerator. We demonstrate how costly access to contingent asset-markets generates these effects. The key insight stems from the non-monotonic relationship between wealth and desired degree of insurance, in an economy with participation costs. Poor borrowing constrained households remain uninsured, middle-class households are almost perfectly insured, while rich households decide to self-insure by purchasing risk-free assets. This feature of households' risk management has crucial effects in asset prices, wealth inequality, and social mobility.

On International Consumption Risk Sharing, Financial Integration and Financial Development

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the empirical link between international consumption risk sharing, financial integration, and financial development for a group of twenty-nine developed and developing countries in the G7, the Euro area, and the OECD. Estimation results indicate that (1) risk sharing in the Euro area is higher than those in the G-7 and the OECD, and (2) a higher degree of risk sharing is associated with a greater degree of financial integration and a lower level of financial development. These results suggest that more financially integrated countries might be better able to insure themselves against idiosyncratic income shocks and countries with more developed financial markets might tend to engage in less consumption risk sharing with other countries thanks to their own sophisticated financial markets. Holding financial integration and financial development equal, countries in the Euro area engage in significantly more risk sharing than the ones in the G7 and the OECD.

Migration and Land Rental as Responses to Income Shocks in Rural China

AbstractUsing longitudinal household survey data from rural China and an identification strategy based on observed rainfall realizations, we are able to test household responses to idiosyncratic and covariate income shocks. We find that negative idiosyncratic income shocks increase migration and elicit household out rental of land. The effect of covariate income shocks is generally dependent on both the timing and the nature of the shock. Our results suggest that rainfall deficiencies during paddy maturing or harvesting seasons reduce the number of migrants by raising the marginal value product of farm labour, thereby increasing the opportunity costs associated with migration.