International Risk Sharing During the Globalization Era

Download or read book International Risk Sharing During the Globalization Era written by Mr.Akito Matsumoto and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though theory suggests financial globalization should improve international risk sharing, empirical support has been limited. We develop a simple welfare-based measure that captures how far countries are from the ideal of perfect risk sharing. We then take it to data and find international risk sharing has, indeed, improved during globalization. Improved risk sharing comes mostly from the convergence in rates of consumption growth among countries rather than from synchronization of consumption at the business cycle frequency. Our finding explains why many existing measures fail to detect improved risk sharing-they focus only on risk sharing at the business cycle frequency.