Arguments for creating a market to allow trading the portfolio of all endowments in the entire world, the "market portfolio," are considered. This world share market would represent a radical innovation, since at the present time only a small fraction of world endowments are traded. Using a...

We construct a new method of decomposing the variance of national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important 'residual' risk-sharing opportunities among peoples of the world. The risk-sharing opportunities we study are nonsystematic risk-sharing opportunities. These...

[...]We address several questions in this paper. First,how could macro markets be useful to the average person?Second, how large are the potential benefits from diversificationif these markets were to be introduced andused optimally? Third, can existing financial marketsachieve a similar degree...