The impact of keeping up with the Joneses behavior on asset prices and portfolio choice

This paper studies the asset pricing and portfolio choice implications of keeping up with the Joneses preferences. In terms of portfolio choice, we provide sufficient conditions on the utility function under which no portfolio bias can arise across agents in equilibrium. Regarding asset prices, we find that under Joneses behavior asset prices are a function of the economy's aggregate consumption, the agents preference parameters, the wealth endowment distribution and the weighting across agents in the Joneses definition. We present necessary and sufficient conditions such that equilibrium prices are only a function of aggregate wealth. Non-financial, non-diversifiable income is introduced in the model. In the presence of Joneses behavior, an under-diversified equilibrium emerges where investors will bias their portfolios towards the financial assets that better hedge their exposure to the non-financial income risk.     

Implications of Keeping‐Up‐with‐the‐Joneses Behavior for the Equilibrium Cross Section of Stock Returns: International Evidence

This paper tests the cross‐sectional implications of “keeping‐up‐with‐the‐Joneses” (KUJ) preferences in an international setting. When agents have KUJ preferences, in the presence of undiversifiable nonfinancial wealth, both world and domestic risk (the idiosyncratic component of domestic wealth) are priced, and the equilibrium price of risk of the domestic factor is negative. We use labor income as a proxy for domestic wealth and find empirical support for these predictions. In terms of explaining the cross‐section of stock returns and the size of the pricing errors, the model performs better than alternative international asset pricing models.     

Diversification and Its Discontents: Idiosyncratic and Entrepreneurial Risk in the Quest for Social Status

Social status concerns influence investors' decisions by driving a wedge in attitudes toward aggregate and idiosyncratic risks. I model such concerns by emphasizing the desire to “get ahead of the Joneses,” which implies that aversion to idiosyncratic risk is lower than aversion to aggregate risk. The model predicts that investors hold concentrated portfolios in equilibrium, which helps rationalize the small premium for undiversified entrepreneurial risk. In the model, status concerns are more important for wealthier households. Consequently, these households own a disproportionate share of risky assets, particularly private equity, and experience greater volatility of consumption, consistent with empirical evidence.     

Commodity Bonds and Consumption Risks

This paper analyzes the economic role of commodity bonds by examining the nature of the demand for these securities. I show that while commodity bonds protect against relative price changes, they do so by introducing variability into the future real income stream. This variability limits the desirability of using commodity bonds to provide “price insurance” for future consumption. However, this variability may allow commodity bonds to hedge risks to consumption caused by stochastic changes in income. The analysis also suggests that it is this “income insurance” rather than “price insurance” that is important in hedging risks to future consumption.     

Capital markets,financial intermediaries,and liquidity supply

We study a dynamic economy endowed with a sequence of overlapping generations of consumers and production processes, and where productive assets are illiquid and consumption preferences are subject to uninsurable demand for liquidity. We characterize the steady states that can be achieved with alternative financial systems. We show that infinitely lived financial intermediaries offering a liability with age-dependent restrictions may implement a social optimum with full insurance. If, instead, they offer anonymous, unrestricted contracts, then only second-best consumption allocations with partial insurance obtain. We also examine the consumption allocations available when agents can trade shares in competitive stock markets. While allowing for trade across generations may or may not improve upon generational autarky, we show that this competitive equilibrium is not a social optimum, and is dominated by a system of infinitely lived, unrestricted intermediaries.     

Negligence,Ignorance and the Demand for Liability Insurance

This paper considers whether lack of information regarding risk exposures can lead to a demand for negligence liability insurance. We find that, under the uniform negligence rule, such as the “reasonable person” standard used to determine negligence in the U.S. and other countries, the value of information is positive and any demand for liability insurance must come from informed individuals. The necessary and sufficient condition is that good risks find it less costly to be negligent and purchase insurance.     

Catching up with the Americans

This paper develops an international version of the consumption-based capital asset pricing (CCAPM), which we refer to as “catching up with the Americans.” Previous CCAPM research develops the concept of “catching up with the Joneses,” where a representative economic agent exhibits higher marginal utility of consumption as a result of higher past per capita consumption in his own country. Catching up with the Americans, on the other hand, is an international habit-preference hypothesis. It extends the idea of catching up with the Joneses by stating that consumers of non-U.S. countries gain higher marginal utility of consumption as a result of higher past American consumption growth. Contrary to much of the CCAPM literature, we test this version of the model using long bond rates rather than equity returns. However, like most of the previous research on the CCAPM, the catching up with the Americans model fails to explain the relationship between consumption and asset returns.     

Was spricht eigentlich gegen eine private Arbeitslosenversicherung?

This article wants to base the current discussion about the privatization of unemployment insurance on a perspective of insurance economics. The arguments against private unemployment insurance are separated in two prospects: insurance technique and social policy. Therefore, the mixing of objective-technical and normative arguments, which is widely spread in the literature, is broken down. It is shown that the only criterion, which holds against private unemployment insurance, is that of “relative poorness”. Consequently, from a social policy perspective the monetary burden of actuarial premiums on people at high and medium risk is not acceptable. Arguments like positively correlated risks, moral hazard, insufficient differentiation of premiums and collectively underestimated individual unemployment risks appear to be poorly valid. As a solution of the problem of “relative poorness” a new outline for privatization of unemployment insurance is presented. The proposal focuses on a combination of private unemployment and pension insurance.     

How does deposit insurance affect bank risk? Evidence from the recent crisis

Deposit insurance is widely offered in a number of countries as part of a financial system safety net to promote stability. An unintended consequence of deposit insurance is the reduction in the incentive of depositors to monitor banks which lead to excessive risk-taking. We examine the relation between deposit insurance and bank risk and systemic fragility in the years leading up to and during the recent financial crisis. We find that generous financial safety nets increase bank risk and systemic fragility in the years leading up to the global financial crisis. However, during the crisis, bank risk is lower and systemic stability is greater in countries with deposit insurance coverage. Our findings suggest that the “moral hazard effect” of deposit insurance dominates in good times while the “stabilization effect” of deposit insurance dominates in turbulent times. The overall effect of deposit insurance over the full sample we study remains negative since the destabilizing effect during normal times is greater in magnitude compared to the stabilizing effect during global turbulence. In addition, we find that good bank supervision can alleviate the unintended consequences of deposit insurance on bank systemic risk during good times, suggesting that fostering the appropriate incentive framework is very important for ensuring systemic stability.     

A new basis of calculation for collective pensions insurance in Norway

The writing of collective pensions insurance in Norway was first taken up in 1917 by the “Norske Folk”, a life insurance company, founded by the seven oldest Norwegian life insurance companies, and a short time afterwards this kind of insurance was also taken up by the “Norske Forenede”. Finally, in 1931, the “Samvirke” which had been established a short time before by the Norwegian Cooperative Association, began to write collective pensions insurance.     

重大公共卫生危机下的健康保险应对研究

公共卫生危机对经济的影响较大,21世纪以来,面对频发的重大公共卫生危机,健康保险业如何通过科技赋能,有效参与到公共卫生安全体系建设中亟待研究对策。通过数据比较分析法、模型构建法,分析了我国商业健康保险业在防控重大疫情期间的作为、短板、机遇和挑战,并基于健康保险参与公共卫生安全体系建设的国际经验和保险科技的发展,提出了我国健康保险业应对重大公共卫生危机的一系列政策建议,以便完善现有公共卫生安全体系,助推"健康中国战略"和"可持续发展战略"的实现。     

Consumer risk perceptions and information in insurance markets with adverse selection

Standard models of adverse selection in insurance markets assume policyholders know their loss distributions. This study examines the nature of equilibrium and the equilibrium value of information in competitive insurance markets where consumers lack complete information regarding their loss probabilities. We show that additional private information is privately and socially valuable. When the equilibrium policies separate types, policyholders can deduce the underlying probabilities from the contracts, so it is information on risk type, rather than loss probability per se, that is valuable. We show that the equilibrium is “as if” policyholders were endowed with complete knowledge if, and only if, information is noiseless and costless. If information is noisy, the equilibrium depends on policyholders' prior beliefs and the amount of noise in the information they acquire.     

Session Ii: Capitalism and Social Insurance

In what Jeff Gordon describes as “the great risk shift,” large U.S. companies have responded during the last 50 years to the forces of globalization and increased pressure from investors by transferring the risks associated with product and worker obsolescence from their shareholders to their employees. Layoffs have generally meant very large, if not complete, losses of “firm‐specific investments” by displaced employees. And the problem is especially troubling in the U.S., where the employees of large companies lose not only their jobs and income streams, but also often their connection to their social network, to the entire system of social welfare and insurance that tends to be provided by large companies and the workplace. While applauding corporate retraining programs, Gordon suggests that individual company efforts are likely to be overwhelmed by the demand for such services. The solution accordingly lies in the form of government‐provided social insurance—in programs that, whether orchestrated and funded at the state or federal level, provide the most cost‐effective government “match” designed to ensure the preservation of human potential and lifetime earnings power of employees.     

Option Valuation with Systematic Stochastic Volatility

We use an extension of the equilibrium framework of Rubinstein ( 1976 ) and Brennan ( 1979 ) to derive an option valuation formula when the stock return volatility is both stochastic and systematic. Our formula incorporates a stochastic volatility process as well as a stochastic interest rate process in the valuation of options. If the “mean,” volatility, and “covariance” processes for the stock return and the consumption growth are predictable, our option valuation formula can be written in “preference-free” form. Further, many popular option valuation formulae in the literature can be written as special cases of our general formula.     

Consumption,asset wealth,equity premium,term spread,and flight to quality

We link transitory deviations of consumption from its equilibrium relationship with aggregate wealth and labor income to equity returns on the one hand, and to two characteristics of bond investors—the premium demanded to hold long‐term assets, and “flight to quality” behavior—on the other hand. Using a panel of 10 euro area countries over the period 1984Q1–2017Q4, we show that a rise in the consumption–wealth ratio predicts both higher equity returns and the future term spread, while a fall in the consumption–wealth ratio explains a large fraction of the rise in the spread between the “risky” and the “safe‐haven” bond.     

风险分散与中国混合型基本养老保险制度改革研究

本文从参保人养老投资风险分散角度研究混合型基本养老保险制度设计。通过构建一个两期消费模型,综合考虑参保人所面临的人口结构、工资增长率、养老基金投资等风险因素,本文研究了混合型基本养老保险制度中现收现付制与基金积累制的最优比例,并利用中国数据进行了测算与敏感性分析。研究发现:引入小规模个人账户基金积累制可以分散人口老龄化给现收现付制所带来的风险,中国实行混合型基本养老保险制度有其合理性;但如果要维持40%～45%的养老金替代率水平,中国基本养老保险制度的财务可持续性会面临较大挑战。     

Market selection with learning and catching up with the Joneses

We study the market selection hypothesis in complete financial markets, populated by heterogeneous agents. We allow for a rich structure of heterogeneity: individuals may differ in their beliefs concerning the economy, information and learning mechanism, risk aversion, impatience and ‘catching up with the Joneses’ preferences. We develop new techniques for studying the long-run behavior of such economies, based on Strassen’s functional law of the iterated logarithm. In particular, we explicitly determine an agent’s survival index and show how the latter depends on the agent’s characteristics. We use these results to study the long-run behavior of the equilibrium interest rate and the market price of risk.     

Insurance Pricing,Reserving, and Performance Evaluation Under External Constraints on Capitalization and Return on Equity

We derive formulas for calculating the premiums that should be charged on policies in a discounted cash flow model with tax reserves and required assets that are determined by regulation. We also determine the unique division of required assets into “reserves” and “capital” that allows the product profitability to be correctly evaluated. That is, the profit after capital charges is zero if the product achieves the return assumed in pricing. We illustrate the concepts using whole life insurance and guaranteed minimum death benefit examples.     

Non-monotonic pricing kernel and an extended class of mixture of distributions for option pricing

We derive closed form European option pricing formulae under the general equilibrium framework for underlying assets that have an \(N\) -mixture of transformed normal distributions. The component distributions need not belong to the same class but must all be transformed normal. An important implication of our results is that the mixture of distributions is consistent with a “what appears to be abnormal” non-monotonic (asset specific) pricing kernel for the S&P 500 and that the representative agent has a “logical” monotonic decreasing marginal utility. We show that a mixture of two lognormal distributions is sufficient to produce this result and also implied volatility smiles of a wide variety of shapes.     

Dynamic competition with network externalities: how history matters

We consider dynamic competition among platforms in a market with network externalities. A platform that dominated the market in the previous period becomes “focal” in the current period, in that agents play the equilibrium in which they join the focal platform whenever such equilibrium exists. Yet when faced with higher-quality competition, can a low-quality platform remain focal? In the finite-horizon case, the unique equilibrium is efficient for “patient” platforms; with an infinite time horizon, however, there are multiple equilibria where either the low- or high-quality platform dominates. If qualities are stochastic, the platform with a better average quality wins with a higher probability, even when its realized quality is lower, and this probability increases as platforms become more patient. Hence, social welfare may decline as platforms become more forward looking.