Cochrane (1991 , Journal of Political Economy 99, 957--976) and Mace (1991 , Journal of Political Economy 99, 928--956) test if risk sharing across households is complete in the sense that household consumption moves one-for-one with aggregate consumption. In their studies the source of income risk is idiosyncratic, and agents can share risk across the entire economy. Using a sample of households from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), we explore whether households share the risk associated with their industries and regions across households in other regions and industries. We find that a large fraction of risk faced by households is not shared across regions and industries. Keyword(s): Risk sharing; Quantity anomaly.

Risk sharing in an economy is achieved by the contribution of different sectors. Government, households, and corporations sectors contribute to risk sharing, but the extent of their role on risk-sharing has not been so far quantified. We investigate risk sharing channels across economic sectors to quantify to what extent they contribute offsetting idiosyncratic shocks. We examine the two most relevant channels of smoothing among OECD and EU countries: the international investment income and the savings channels. We find that the households' share in net foreign asset income has a significant role in risk sharing. This surprising result is strictly related to the accumulation of households' foreign asset holdings. On the contrary, governments' cross-border holdings produce a dis-smoothing effect and this might be imputable to the holding of EU countries' assets. This outcome is reversed for the new EU countries in the post Global Financial Crisis (GFC) period. With regard to the savings channel, we find that governments significantly contribute to risk sharing, and more significantly after the inception of the GFC. Moreover, the dividend smoothing theory reconciles with the risk-sharing findings since corporations (in particular non financial) significantly smooth shocks through their savings, however their contribution to risk sharing is weak in the post-GFC era.

This book brings the intranational macroeconomics literature into clearer focus by collecting the strands of research into a common thread.

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.