When formal insurance is unavailable, mutual insurance among households can serve as an alternative. This paper analyzes a game between economic agents facing uncertainty and maximizing discounted utility without enforceable contracts or access to capital markets. While autarky is always a...

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (ΕPU-S), one that captures national and international...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

This paper proposes risk sharing strategies, which allow insurers to cooperate and diversify non-systemic risk. We deal with both deviation measures and coherent risk measures and provide general mathematical methods applying to optimize them all. Numerical examples are given in order to...

This article considers an economy where risk is insurable, but selection determines the pool of individuals who take it up. First, we demonstrate that the comparative statics of these economies do not necessarily depend on its marginal selection (adverse versus favorable), but rather other...