Risk-Sharing and the Creation of Systemic Risk

Viral Acharya, Aaditya M. Iyer and Rangarajan K Sundaram

No 15269, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents self-hedge and hold more liquid assets; this buffers aggregate risks, resulting in few correlated failures compared to when there is greater risk sharing. We apply this insight to build a model of a clearinghouse to show that as risk-sharing improves, aggregate liquidity falls but correlated failures rise. Public liquidity injections, for example, in the form of a lender-of-last-resort can reduce this systemic risk ex post, but induce lower ex-ante levels of private liquidity, which can in turn aggravate welfare costs from such injections.

JEL-codes: G21 G22 G31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-rmg
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