A safe asset's real value is insulated from shocks, including declines in GDP from rare macroeconomic disasters. However, in a Lucas-tree world, the aggregate risk is given by the process for GDP and cannot be altered by the creation of safe assets. Therefore, in the equilibrium of a...

Consider a simple two-state risk with equal probabilities for the two states. In particular, assume that the random wealth variable Xi dominates Yi via ith-order stochastic dominance for i = M,N. We show that the 50-50 lottery [XN + YM, YN + XM] dominates the lottery [XN + XM, YN + YM] via (N +...