Staff Reports
How Big Are Potential Welfare Gains from International Sharing?
January 1998 Number 37
JEL classification: F41, F30, G15

Author: Eric van Wincoop

There is extensive evidence that the degree of risksharing accomplished by international financial markets is low. Some have argued that this is the result of small potential benefits from risksharing. The gains from riskpooling that have been reported in the literature range from negligible to enormous. This paper documents to what extent the results are sensitive to the parameterization of preferences, and assumptions about the stochastic process and measurement of the endowment. We find that for realistic assumptions about the underlying factors, the potential gains from risksharing are quite sizable. For OECD countries they are equivalent to increases in tradables consumption in the range of 1.1 to 3.5percent for a 50 year horizon, and 2.5 to 7.4 percent for a 100 year horizon.

Available only in PDFPDF33 pages / 461 kb

For a published version of this report, see Eric van Wincoop, "How Big Are Potential Welfare Gains from International Risksharing?" Journal of International Economics 47, no. 1 (February 1999): 109-35.

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