This paper estimates an empirical nonstationary panel regression model that tests long-run consumption risk sharing across a sample of OECD and emerging market (EM) countries. This is in contrast to the existing literature on consumption risk sharing, which is mainly about risks at business cycle frequency. Since our methodology focuses on identifying cointegrating relationships while allowing for arbitrary short-run dynamics, we can obtain a consistent estimate of long-run risk sharing while disregarding any short-run nuisance factors. Our results show that long-run risk sharing in OECD countries increased more than that in EM countries during the past two decades.

This dissertation contributes to the growing literature of international finance on capital market integration and consumption risk sharing in emerging economies. I identify threshold effects in terms of financial market integration to demarcate regimes with varying extent of international risk sharing in emerging economies. In Chapter 2, I study a model of a small open economy to see how default decisions affect incentives for international consumption risk-sharing based on varying levels of debt to capital ratio in emerging economies while in Chapter 3, I employ a novel endogenous threshold identification method developed by Hansen (1999) for balanced panels, to empirically identify threshold effects of capital market integration on consumption risk-sharing in emerging economies. Finally in Chapter 4, I study the determinants of the capital market integration via level and composition of foreign assets held by emerging economies, exploiting temporal and cross-sectional variation in a panel data set of 37 emerging economies from 1970 - 2007.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston offers the full text of the article entitled "Consumption Risk-sharing Across G-7 Countries," written by Giovanni P. Olivei. The article was published in the March/April 2000 issue of the "New England Economic Review." The text is available in PDF format. Olivei studies national consumption correlations across Group of Seven (G-7) countries to see whether greater incentives to diversify risks internationally have been accompanied by an effective increase in consumption risk-sharing.

Recent research in international business cycles based upon complete markets has found that international consumption correlations are lower than predicted by the standard risk-sharing implications of these models. In this paper, I use regression tests to ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result. First, I consider whether non-separabilities between tradeables and non-tradeable leisure or goods can explain the puzzle. Surprisingly, non-separabilities explain only a tiny fraction of the variation in tradeables consumption across countries. Furthermore, risk-sharing in tradeables is rejected. Second, I examine the effects of capital market restrictions on aggregate consumption risk-sharing by countries. While rejections of risk-sharing are stronger for countries facing more severe capital market restrictions, risk-sharing is still rejected for the unrestricted group of countries. Therefore, risk-sharing does not appear to be resolved by either explanation alone. However, when I allow for both non-separabilities and certain market restrictions, risk-sharing among unrestricted countries is not rejected. This evidence suggests that a combination of these two effects may be necessary to explain consumption risk-sharing across countries.