DP15269 Risk-Sharing and the Creation of Systemic Risk

Author(s):	Viral V. Acharya, Aaditya M. Iyer, Rangarajan K Sundaram
Publication Date:	September 2020
Keyword(s):
JEL(s):	G21, G22, G31
Programme Areas:	Financial Economics
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15269

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.