This paper reviews three important issues in the literature on international and intranational risk sharing. First, we establish a comprehensive set of stylized facts for consumption risk sharing within and across countries. Consistent with the findings in the literature, we find that the...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

This paper examines the institutions that enable households to insure against idiosyncratic risk. Using a decentralized general equilibrium model, I test for consumption and leisure insurance against unanticipated income shocks. I find that differential access to markets (particularly financial...