IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/bejtec/v10y2010i1n31.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Quantifying the Cost of Risk in Consumption

Author

Listed:
  • Tirelli Mario

    (Roma Tre University, tirelli@uniroma3.it)

  • Turner Sergio

    (sergio_turner@brown.edu)

Abstract

Fixing a risky intertemporal, interagent consumption profile, its total cost is the total willingness to pay for smoothing everyone's consumption. It decomposes into a micro cost that captures the inefficiency in the cross-sectional distribution of total consumption, risky as it is, and a macro cost that captures the additional benefit of eliminating the risk in total consumption, once efficiently redistributed.We consider the risk that a household experiences income mobility and the consequent consumption mobility. U.S. panel data estimates a consumption profile for which we compute the costs. The total cost is 9-18% of total initial consumption for CRRA parameters 1.25-3.5. Of this, 80-90% is the micro cost and only 10-20% is the macro cost. The magnitude of these results, and in particular the relative importance of the micro cost, is in line with previous empirical evidence.Motivated by this evidence we develop the theory of micro cost. Moreover, because the micro cost does not admit a closed form, for general preferences, we lay out an approximation method.

Suggested Citation

  • Tirelli Mario & Turner Sergio, 2010. "Quantifying the Cost of Risk in Consumption," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 1-33, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:bpj:bejtec:v:10:y:2010:i:1:n:31
    DOI: 10.2202/1935-1704.1668
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1704.1668
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2202/1935-1704.1668?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. tom krebs, 2004. "welfare cost of business cycles when markets are incomplete," Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings 283, Econometric Society.
    2. Geanakoplos, J. & Polemarchakis, H., 1985. "Existence,regularity, and constrained suboptimality of competitive allocations when the asset market is incomplete," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 1985037, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    3. Fernando Alvarez & Urban J. Jermann, 2004. "Using Asset Prices to Measure the Cost of Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(6), pages 1223-1256, December.
    4. Fisher Jonathan D & Johnson David S, 2006. "Consumption Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Two Panel Data Sets," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1), pages 1-38, September.
    5. Richard Blundell & Luigi Pistaferri & Ian Preston, 2008. "Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1887-1921, December.
    6. Tullio Jappelli & Luigi Pistaferri, 2006. "Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 4(1), pages 75-115, March.
    7. Heathcote, Jonathan & Storesletten, Kjetil & Violante, Giovanni L., 2008. "Insurance and opportunities: A welfare analysis of labor market risk," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 501-525, April.
    8. Cochrane, John H, 1991. "A Simple Test of Consumption Insurance," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 99(5), pages 957-976, October.
    9. Storesletten, Kjetil & Telmer, Chris I. & Yaron, Amir, 2001. "The welfare cost of business cycles revisited: Finite lives and cyclical variation in idiosyncratic risk," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(7), pages 1311-1339.
    10. Geanakoplos, J. & Magill, M. & Quinzii, M. & Dreze, J., 1990. "Generic inefficiency of stock market equilibrium when markets are incomplete," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1-2), pages 113-151.
    11. Attanasio, Orazio & Davis, Steven J, 1996. "Relative Wage Movements and the Distribution of Consumption," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(6), pages 1227-1262, December.
    12. Mario Tirelli, 2003. "Income taxation when markets are incomplete," Decisions in Economics and Finance, Springer;Associazione per la Matematica, vol. 26(2), pages 97-128, November.
    13. Robert E. Lucas Jr., 2003. "Macroeconomic Priorities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 1-14, March.
    14. Salyer, Kevin D., 2007. "Macroeconomic priorities and crash states," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 64-70, January.
    15. Citanna, A. & Polemarchakis, H.M. & Tirelli, M., 2006. "The taxation of trades in assets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 299-313, January.
    16. Per Krusell & Anthony A. Smith, Jr., 1999. "On the Welfare Effects of Eliminating Business Cycles," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 2(1), pages 245-272, January.
    17. Tom Krebs, 2007. "Job Displacement Risk and the Cost of Business Cycles," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 664-686, June.
    18. David K. Levine & William R. Zame, 2002. "Does Market Incompleteness Matter?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(5), pages 1805-1839, September.
    19. Atsushi Kajii & Antonio Villanacci & Alessandro Citanna, 1998. "Constrained suboptimality in incomplete markets: a general approach and two applications," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 11(3), pages 495-521.
    20. Dirk Krueger & Fabrizio Perri, 2006. "Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(1), pages 163-193.
    21. Bewley, Truman F., 1980. "The permanent income hypothesis and long-run economic stability," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 377-394, June.
    22. Tom Krebs, 2003. "Human Capital Risk and Economic Growth," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(2), pages 709-744.
    23. Chatterjee, Satyajit & Corbae, Dean, 2007. "On the aggregate welfare cost of Great Depression unemployment," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(6), pages 1529-1544, September.
    24. Tom Krebs, 2003. "Growth and Welfare Effects of Business Cycles in Economies with Idiosyncratic Human Capital Risk," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 6(4), pages 846-868, October.
    25. Andrew Atkeson & Christopher Phelan, 1994. "Reconsidering the Costs of Business Cycles with Incomplete Markets," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1994, Volume 9, pages 187-218, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    26. Robert J. Barro, 2009. "Rare Disasters, Asset Prices, and Welfare Costs," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(1), pages 243-264, March.
    27. Herakles Polemarchakis, 2001. "The taxation of trades in assests," Working Papers 2001-21, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Heathcote, Jonathan & Storesletten, Kjetil & Violante, Giovanni L., 2008. "Insurance and opportunities: A welfare analysis of labor market risk," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 501-525, April.
    2. Jonathan Heathcote & Kjetil Storesletten & Giovanni L. Violante, 2009. "Quantitative Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Households," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 319-354, May.
    3. Jung, Philip & Kuester, Keith, 2011. "The (un)importance of unemployment fluctuations for the welfare cost of business cycles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 35(10), pages 1744-1768, October.
    4. Philip Jung & Keith Kuester, 2008. "The (un)importance of unemployment fluctuations for welfare," Working Papers 08-31, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    5. Per Krusell & Toshihiko Mukoyama & Aysegul Sahin & Anthony A. Smith, Jr., 2009. "Revisiting the Welfare Effects of Eliminating Business Cycles," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 12(3), pages 393-402, July.
    6. Tom Krebs & Martin Scheffel, 2016. "Labor Market Institutions and the Cost of Recessions," CESifo Working Paper Series 6262, CESifo.
    7. Ricardo Reis, 2009. "The Time-Series Properties of Aggregate Consumption: Implications for the Costs of Fluctuations," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 7(4), pages 722-753, June.
    8. Tom Krebs, 2014. "Labor Market Reform and the Cost of Business Cycles," 2014 Meeting Papers 1017, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Jang-Ok Cho & Thomas Cooley & Hyung Seok Kim, 2015. "Business Cycle Uncertainty and Economic Welfare," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 18(2), pages 185-200, April.
    10. Tom Krebs, 2006. "Multi-Dimensional Risk and the Cost of Business Cycles," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 9(4), pages 640-658, October.
    11. Kyle Chauvin & David Laibson & Johanna Mollerstrom, 2011. "Asset Bubbles and the Cost of Economic Fluctuations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43, pages 233-260, August.
    12. R. Anton BRAUN & NAKAJIMA Tomoyuki, 2009. "Optimal Monetary Policy When Asset Markets are Incomplete," Discussion papers 09050, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    13. tom krebs, 2004. "welfare cost of business cycles when markets are incomplete," Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings 283, Econometric Society.
    14. Gadi Barlevy, 2004. "The Cost of Business Cycles and the Benefits of Stabilization: A Survey," NBER Working Papers 10926, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Greg Kaplan & Giovanni L. Violante, 2010. "How Much Consumption Insurance beyond Self-Insurance?," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 53-87, October.
    16. Alisdair McKay & Tamas Papp, 2011. "Accounting for Idiosyncratic Wage Risk Over the Business Cycle," Boston University - Department of Economics - Working Papers Series WP2011-028, Boston University - Department of Economics.
    17. Mian, A. & Sufi, A., 2016. "Who Bears the Cost of Recessions? The Role of House Prices and Household Debt," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 255-296, Elsevier.
    18. Mordecai Kurz, 2005. "Measuring the Ex-Ante Social Cost of Aggregate Volatility," Discussion Papers 04-006, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
    19. repec:pri:wwseco:dp233 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Ensar Yılmaz, 2014. "Welfare Costs of Business Cycles in Turkey," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 65(2), pages 195-211, May.
    21. Cho, Daeha & Ma, Eunseong, 2023. "The heterogeneous welfare effects of business cycles," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 153(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:bejtec:v:10:y:2010:i:1:n:31. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.