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SSRN Electronic Journal

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1572665

Oxford University Press (OUP), The Review of Financial Studies, 7(25), p. 2189-2224

DOI: 10.1093/rfs/hhs064

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Rare Disasters and Risk Sharing with Heterogeneous Beliefs

Journal article published in 2010 by Hui Chen, Scott Stephen Walter Joslin, Ngoc-Khanh Tran
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Question mark in circle
Preprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Postprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Published version: policy unknown

Abstract

Although the threat of rare economic disasters can have large effect on asset prices, difficulty in inference regarding both their likelihood and severity provides the potential for disagreements among investors. Such disagreements lead investors to insure each other against the types of disasters each one fears the most. Due to the highly nonlinear relationship between consumption losses in a disaster and the risk premium, a small amount of risk sharing can significantly attenuate the effect that disaster risk has on the equity premium. We characterize the sensitivity of risk premium to wealth distribution analytically. Our model shows that time variation in the wealth distribution and the amount of disagreement across agents can both lead to significant variation in disaster risk premium. It also highlights the conditions under which disaster risk premium will be large, namely when disagreement across agents is small or when the wealth distribution is highly concentrated in agents fearful of disasters. Finally, the model predicts an inverse U-shaped relationship between the equity premium and the size of the disaster insurance market.