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Report
Worker Betas: Five Facts about Systematic Earnings Risk
The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and ?nancial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender, age, the worker?s earnings level, and industry. Aggregate risk exposure is U-shaped with respect to the earnings level. In the middle of the earnings distribution, aggregate risk exposure is higher for males, younger workers, and those in construction and durable manufacturing. At the top of the earnings ...
Report
The Cost of Financial Frictions for Life Insurers
During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as ?19 percent for annuities and ?57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions, interacting with statutory reserve regulation that allowed life insurers to record far less than a dollar of reserve per dollar of future insurance liability. We identify the shadow cost of capital through exogenous variation in required reserves across different types of policies. The shadow cost was ...
Report
Shadow Insurance
Liabilities ceded by life insurers to shadow reinsurers (i.e., affiliated and less regulated off-balance-sheet entities) grew from $11 billion in 2002 to $364 billion in 2012. Life insurers using shadow insurance, which capture half of the market share, ceded 25 cents of every dollar insured to shadow reinsurers in 2012, up from 2 cents in 2002. Our adjustment for shadow insurance reduces risk-based capital by 53 percentage points (or 3 rating notches) and raises default probabilities by a factor of 3.5. We develop a structural model of the life insurance industry and estimate the impact of ...
Working Paper
Worker Betas: Five Facts About Systematic Earnings Risk
The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender, age, the worker?s earnings level, and industry. Aggregate risk exposure is U-shaped with respect to the earnings level. In the middle of the earnings distribution, males, younger workers, and those in construction and durable manufacturing are more exposed to aggregate risk. At the top of the earnings ...
Discussion Paper
Growing Risk in the Insurance Sector
Developing risk in the life insurance industry requires prudent policy response to prevent broader economic damage.
Working Paper
Does firm value move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in cash flow?
Movements in the value of corporate assets are justified by changes in expected future cash flow. The appropriate measure of cash flow for valuing assets is net payout, which is the sum of dividends, interest, and net repurchases of equity and debt. When discount rates are low and equity issuance is high, expected cash-flow growth is low because firms repurchase debt to offset equity issuance. A variance decomposition of the ratio of net payout reveals little transitory variation in discount rates that is not offset by common variation with expected cashflow growth.
Report
A Demand System Approach to Asset Pricing
This Staff Report was previously titled "An Equilibrium Model of Institutional Demand and Asset Prices." {{p}} We develop an asset pricing model with rich heterogeneity in asset demand across investors, designed to match institutional holdings data. The equilibrium price vector is uniquely determined by market clearing, which equates the supply of each asset to aggregate demand. We estimate the model on U.S. stock market data by instrumental variables, under an identifying assumption that allows for price impact. The model sheds light on the role of institutions in stock market ...
Report
Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice
We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and ...