Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighborhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

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 diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

Previous work on the effects of intergenerational transfers has implied that such transfers benefit recipients by insuring against labor market risks. Allowing for equilibrium labor market responses, however, one would expect the aggregate level of transfers to affect the distribution of wages...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to enter a lottery. We relate this measure to consumers' endowment and attributes and to measures of background risk. We find that risk aversion is a...

This study investigates the real options with spatial analysis in China's real estate markets. We employ new detailed macro-level data set for 31 provinces in China to test the central predictions of real options with respect to land development. We extended the real options method with spatial...

This paper uses an estimated structural model to argue that the option to move in and out of the parental home is an important insurance channel against labor market risk for youths who do not attend college. Using data from the NLSY97, I construct a new monthly panel of parent-youth coresidence...

Retirees face longevity risk, or the risk of living longer (or less long) than expected; market risk, or the risk of poor investment returns over the retirement horizon, and finally; failure risk, or the risk of running out of money before death. The authors examine the sensitivity of these three...

This study explores the issue of what is an appropriate default equity glide-path for client portfolios during the retirement phase of the life cycle. We find, surprisingly, that rising equity glide-paths in retirement – where the portfolio starts out conservative and becomes more aggressive...

This study sets out to discuss and test the potential risk factors of energy efficiency retrofits. It reviews both the short- and long-term assumptions regarding the various uncertainties associated with input parameters to assess their potential effect on outcomes predicted by conventional...

Assessing the importance of uninsurable wage risk for individual financial choices faces two challenges. First, the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of risk that cannot be diversified or avoided. Moreover, measures of uninsurable wage risk must...