Labor Income Risk Research Articles

Optimal investment for a retirement plan with deferred annuities allowing for inflation and labour income risk

We construct an optimal investment portfolio model for an individual investor saving in a retirement plan. The investor earns stochastic labour income with both permanent and temporary shocks, and has access to equity, conventional bond, inflation-indexed bond and cash, as well as two types of deferred annuities: nominal and inflation-protected. The objective function consists of power utility in terms of real retirement income from the annuities as well as bequest from remaining wealth in tradable securities. Asset returns are represented by a vector autoregressive model underpinned by Nelson–Siegel real and nominal yield curves. The optimization problem is solved numerically using multi-stage stochastic programming with a hybrid scenario structure combining a scenario tree with scenario fans. Our numerical results show that deferred annuities are bought early and in increasing amounts during the working lifetime of the investor, with portfolio risk declining with age. Welfare is diminished by 40% if deferred annuities are not available. Inflation-protected deferred annuities are marginally more important in the presence of real labour income risk, but nominal deferred annuities are bought as a cheaper alternative if real yields are low or negative. Portfolio composition and annuity allocation vary depending on financial market expectations, but our central result about the importance of deferred annuities is robust to a variety of financial market conditions.

Monetary Non-Neutrality in a Multi sector Economy: The Role of Risk-Sharing

We show that the extent of risk-sharing among heterogeneous workers is adeterminant of the degree of monetary non-neutrality in a multisector sticky-price model. Workers are employed in different sectors of the economy and, as a consequence, earn different wages. The inability of workers to insure fully against their labor income risks generates strategic complementarity in price-setting decisions of firms with respect to aggregate shocks and strategic substitutability with respect to idiosyncratic shocks. Such pricing interactions lead to slow price adjustments to monetary and other aggregate shocks, thereby producing large fluctuations ofthe output gap, without dampening price responses to idiosyncratic shocks. This in turn allows for large responses of sectoral and aggregate outputs to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We illustrate our results under three stylized asset market setups: complete markets, non-contingent bond-only markets, and financial autarky.

Endogenous Stock Market Participation and Wealth Accumulation: A Life-Cycle Model Perspective

We propose a life-cycle model, where individuals facing uninsurable labor income risks choose whether to participate the stock market and make decisions on home-ownership, in an environment with social safety net and the retirement savings system. The model is motivated by the empirical finding that active stock market participation is associated with higher level of education and employment experience in the finance sector. The model exhibits good fit on portfolio choice, home-ownership, consumption pattern in the cross- section and through life-cycle. We find that the lack of stock market access, proxied by a fixed entry cost and variable costs, plays a key role in generating heterogeneous outcome in agent’s wealth accumulation, and therefore, increases wealth inequality.

Income Risks and Optimal Attention-Consumption Allocation

This paper studies how agents allocate their limited attention between capital income and labor income risks in a two-period consumption-saving model with recursive utility. Specifically, we examine how the optimal attention and consumption-saving decisions are affected by the key model elements including the attention and wealth endowments, the risk and time preferences, and the amount of income risks. We also find that the simple model can have the potential to explain the consumption responses to the income risks and the relative volatility of consumption to income observed in the U.S. economy. Finally, we find that the welfare losses due to limited attention are insignificant.

The role of labor-income risk in household risk-taking

Abstract In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this risk-taking pattern. Uncontrollable labor-income risk stresses middle-income households more because labor income is a larger fraction of their total lifetime resources compared with the rich. In response, middle-income households reduce (controllable) financial risk. Richer households, having less pressure, can afford more risk-taking. The poor take low risk because they avoid jeopardizing their subsistence consumption.

Geographic Heterogeneity in Housing Market Risk and Portfolio Choice

The U.S. housing market is heterogeneous in that house price dynamics vary greatly across regions. Depending on the location of the main residence, households are exposed to completely different housing market risk. This paper examines how geographic heterogeneity in housing market risk affects household portfolio allocations. Housing supply elasticity largely explains variation in housing market risk across regions. Where housing supply elasticity is low, households face higher housing market risk since house price growth rates are more volatile and more positively correlated with stock returns and labor income growth rates. Using the restricted version of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data with detailed geographic information, I find that households in areas with low housing supply elasticity tend to hold less stock in their portfolios. This tendency, however, weakens after retirement when labor income risk disappears.

Time-Varying Relative Risk Aversion: Mechanisms and Evidence

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the issue of time-varying relative risk aversion. We analytically solve a parsimonious life-cycle portfolio choice model with the preferences given by Greenwood, Hercowitz and Huffman (1988, GHH). Our analytical solution identifies four partial equilibrium effects in our model with GHH preferences on risky shares through two channels, and two net effects whose signs hinge on the value of a key structural parameter. With household-level micro data, our mean and quantile regression results show that wealth negatively affects risky shares and the estimated effects are statistically significant and robust. This finding provides strong evidence to support our theoretical prediction. Thus, we show successfully that our portfolio choice model with GHH preferences provides a plausible underlying mechanism in understanding the wealth effect on risky shares in the microdata. Furthermore, we conclude that such a mechanism alone is not sufficient in explaining how risky shares respond to labor income and labor income risks in the microdata.

Demographic Impacts on Life Cycle Portfolios and Financial Market Structures

This paper provides a framework to endogenize rates of return for risk-free bonds and risky capital in an overlapping generation model. The rate of return on capital is endogenized by introducing idiosyncratic production shocks to avoid computation challenges associated with aggregate production shocks in the literature. The framework enables the interaction between financial markets and macroeconomic conditions in a production economy. Based on this framework, the paper first examines life-cycle portfolio choice without demographic change, and illustrates that several factors such as borrowing costs, labor income and production risk play important roles in life-cycle portfolios. The paper then investigates the impacts of population aging on macroeconomic conditions, life-cycle behaviors and financial market structures. The results show that population aging leads to higher capital-labor ratios, and reduces the rates of return on both assets. The bond market shrinks significantly, and capital decreases if the fertility rate declines but increases if the mortality rate declines, leading to structural change in financial markets. The impacts on life-cycle variables are quite different in the fertility and mortality cases particularly at the late stage of life.

Risk Sharing Within the Firm: A Primer

Labor income risk is key to the welfare of most people. This risk is mainly insured the firm and by public institutions, rather than by financial markets. This paper starts by asking why such insurance is provided within the firm, and what determines its boundaries. It identifies four main constraining factors: availability of a public safety net, moral hazard on the employees' side, moral hazard on the firms' side, and workers' wage bargaining power. These factors explain three empirical regularities: (i) family firms provide more employment insurance than nonfamily firms; (ii) the former pay lower real wages, and (iii) firms provide less employment insurance where public unemployment benefits are more generous. The paper also explores the connection between risk sharing and firms' capital structure: greater leverage calls for high wages to compensate employees for greater job risk; nevertheless, firms may want to lever up strategically in order to offset the bargaining power of labor unions. Hence, the distributional conflict between shareholders and workers may limit risk sharing within the firm. By contrast, bondholders and workers are not necessarily in conflict, as both are harmed by firms' risk-taking. In principle, firms may also insure employees against uncertainty about their own talent, but their capacity to do so is constrained by workers' inability to commit to their employer: in the presence of labor market competition, high-talent employees will leave unless paid in line with their high productivity, making uncertainty about talent uninsurable. The paper concludes by showing that risk sharing within firms has declined steadily in the last three decades, and by discussing the financial, competitive, technological and institutional developments that may have conjured this outcome.

Robust equilibrium control-measure policy for a DC pension plan with state-dependent risk aversion under mean-variance criterion

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In reality, when facing a defined contribution (DC) pension fund investment problem, the fund manager may not have sufficient confidence in the reference model and rather considers some similar alternative models. In this paper, we investigate the robust equilibrium control-measure policy for an ambiguity-averse and risk-averse fund manger under the mean-variance (MV) criterion. The ambiguity aversion is introduced by adopting the model uncertainty robustness framework developed by Anderson. The risk aversion model is state-dependent, and takes a linear form of the current wealth level after contribution. Moreover, the fund manager faces stochastic labor income risk and allocates his wealth among a risk-free asset and a risky asset. We also propose two complicated ambiguity preference functions which are economically meaningful and facilitate analytical tractability. Due to the time-inconsistency of the resulting stochastic control problem, we attack it by using the game theoretical framework and the concept of subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. The extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-Isaacs (HJBI) equations and the verification theorem for our problem are established. The explicit expressions for the robust equilibrium policy and the corresponding robust equilibrium value function are derived by stochastic control technique. In addition, we discuss two special cases of our model, which shows that our results extend some existing works in the literature. Finally, some numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effects of model parameters on our robust equilibrium policy.

Technological Innovation and Labor Income Risk

This paper examines the relationship between technological progress and the riskiness of labor income using employer-employee matched income data from the United States. Results suggest innovation is associated with a substantial increase in the labor income risk, especially for workers at the top of the earnings distribution.

The Role of Labor-Income Risk in Household Risk-Taking?

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this risk-taking pattern. Uncontrollable labor-income risk stresses middle-income households more because labor income is a larger fraction of their total lifetime resources compared with the rich. In response, middle-income households reduce (controllable) financial risk. Richer households, having less pressure, can afford more risk-taking. The poor take low risk because they avoid jeopardizing their subsistence consumption.

Technological Innovation and Labor Income Risk

Technological Innovation and Labor Income Risk

Technological Innovation and Labor Income Risk

Using administrative data from the United States, we document novel stylized facts regarding technological innovation and the riskiness of labor income. Higher rates of industry innovation are associated with significant increases in labor earnings for top workers. Decomposing this result, we find that own firm innovation is associated with a modest increase in the mean, but also variance, of worker earnings growth. Innovation by competing firms is related to lower, and more negatively skewed, future earnings. We construct a structural model featuring creative destruction and displacement of human capital that replicates these patterns. In the model, higher rates of innovation by competing firms increases the likelihood that both the worker and the incumbent producer are displaced. By contrast, a higher rate of innovation by the worker's own firm increases profits, but is a mixed blessing for workers, as it increases odds that the skilled worker is no longer a good match to the new technology. Estimating the parameters of the model using indirect inference, we find significant welfare losses and hedging demand against innovation shocks. Consistent with our model, we find that these left tail effects are more pronounced for process improvements, novel innovations, and are concentrated in movers rather than continuing workers.

Health Risk and the Welfare Effects of Social Security

We examine the welfare effects of Social Security in a general equilibrium environment with realistic labor income, mortality, and health risks. We construct an overlapping generations model with rational-expectations households facing idiosyncratic health risk, profit maximizing firms, incomplete insurance markets, and a government that provides pensions and health insurance. We calibrate this model to the U.S. economy and perform two sets of computational experiments: (i) modifying the progressivity of the Social Security's benefit-earnings rule, and (ii) cutting Social Security's payroll tax. We find that both experiments have a larger effect on overall welfare in the presence of health risk, because health risk increases the importance of short-term consumption smoothing, both within work-life and retirement. Increased progressivity allows households to better smooth old-age consumption risk, and the payroll tax cut increases disposable income and allows better self-insurance against early-life health risk. We also find that labor supply is an important self-insurance tool in the presence of health risk, as increasing Social Security's progressivity has a smaller effect on overall welfare and cutting the payroll tax has a larger effect on overall welfare when labor supply is fixed. Finally, low-income households experience larger welfare gains both from increasing Social Security's progressivity and cutting the payroll tax, because of their relatively low ability to self-insure against health risk in general.

Life-Cycle Portfolio Choice with Imperfect Predictors

We study quantitatively how uncertainty in expected stock return predictability affects life-cycle portfolio choice and wealth accumulation in the presence of undiversifiable labor income risk. Households filter information about future expected returns from observed predictors and realized stock returns. Therefore, optimal portfolio choice does not only depend on financial wealth and age, as in more traditional life-cycle models. Counterfactuals demonstrate the magnitude of portfolio demand changes that depend on perceptions about underlying expected returns. On average, life-cycle asset allocation becomes more conservative than models with either i.i.d. stock returns, or clearer signals about expected stock returns.

A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR OPTIMAL TAXATION WITH UNDIVERSIFIABLE RISK

This paper considers a model of linear capital taxation for an economy where capital and labor income are subject to idiosyncratic uninsurable risk. To keep the model tractable, we assume that investment decisions are made before uncertainty is realized, so that the realization of the capital and labor income shocks only affects current consumption. In this setting, we are able to jointly analyze capital and labor income risk and derive analytical results regarding the optimal taxation of capital. We find that the optimal capital tax is positive in the long run if there is only capital income risk. The reason for this is that the capital tax provides insurance against capital income risk. Furthermore, for high levels of risk, increasing the capital tax may actually induce capital accumulation. On the other hand, if there is only labor income risk, the optimal capital tax is zero. The sign of the optimal tax can only be negative if the two types of risk are negatively correlated and labor income risk is large enough.

The theory of precautionary saving: an overview of recent developments

This work reviews recent developments in the literature analyzing precautionary saving. After a description of traditional precautionary saving theory, which considers labor income risk and interest rate risk, we present different research lines which introduce a wide range of extensions and generalizations of the classical model: the contemporaneous presence of multiple risks, changes in risks of different types, multiple variables affecting household utility, preferences non-featuring risk aversion and joint decisions on many choice variables. For each of these issues, we provide specific highlights which summarize the main results obtained in the literature. Lastly, we briefly discuss the analyzes beyond the classical model.

Precautionary retirement and precautionary saving

The paper analyzes the lifetime utility maximization problem of an agent who chooses her saving and timing of retirement in the presence of labor income risk in a simple setting where a pure redistributive pension scheme is in place. In this context, a precautionary motive for retirement, which pushes old workers to replace an uncertain labor income with certain pension payments, and to retire early is identified. The conditions for precautionary retirement and saving to arise are then characterized and interpreted in two settings. In the first setting, utility only depends on income, and a sufficiently low level of absolute prudence is necessary for precautionary retirement. A sufficiently high level is necessary however for precautionary saving, which can coexist with precautionary retirement only for intermediate values of absolute prudence. In the second setting, agent utility also depends on leisure, and three conditions allow the precautionary motive for retirement and saving to jointly operate: prudence, an index of absolute prudence sufficiently low and cross-prudence in leisure.

Optimal Fiscal Policy with Uninsurable Labour Income Risk

This paper studies the optimal design of fiscal policy when financial markets are incomplete at the aggregate and microeconomic level. The government trades a non-state contingent bond (liability) and cannot insure against the uncertainty in future tax revenues, while households are unable to insure against their risk to human capital investments. Because of this risk, the macroeconomic equilibrium is inefficient since asset prices are affected by the extra volatility in private consumption. This element together with the insurance motive of the government to hedge against the uncertainty in tax revenues determine the allocation of assets and the optimal design of fiscal policies. The results show that the government should accumulate assets in order to smooth taxes on labour income, while it should subsidize physical capital in order to increase an inefficiently low level of wages through higher demand for labour. Assessing optimal policies against a negative economic shock, the key findings suggest that a temporary increase in risk-taking is optimal, though not so much through leverage but by a tax policy that incentivise the rebalancing of portfolios towards riskier (but more productive) real assets such as human capital.