Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/203284 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
SAFE Working Paper No. 71
Version Description: 
This Version: April 13, 2015
Publisher: 
Goethe University Frankfurt, SAFE - Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe, Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations. We derive the equilibrium dynamics in closed form and show that joint presence of both risks leads to over-proportional risk exposure for households. This implies that the whole benefit from insurance through social security is greater than the sum of the benefits from insurance against each of the two risks in isolation. We measure this through interaction effects which appear even though the two risks are orthogonal by construction. While the interactions unambiguously increase the welfare benefits from insurance, they can in- or decrease the welfare costs from crowding out of capital formation. The net effect depends on the relative strengths of the opposing forces.
Subjects: 
social security
idiosyncratic risk
aggregate risk
welfare
insurance
crowding out
JEL: 
C68
E27
E62
G12
H55
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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