Disaster Risk and Asset Returns: An International Perspective / Karen K. Lewis, Edith X. Liu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lewis, Karen K.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Liu, Edith X.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23065.

NBER working paper series no. w23065

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Disaster Risk and Asset Returns

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

Recent studies have shown that disaster risk can generate asset return moments similar to those observed in the U.S. data. However, these studies have ignored the cross-country asset pricing implications of the disaster risk model. This paper shows that standard U.S.-based disaster risk model assumptions found in the literature lead to counterfactual international asset pricing implications. Given consumption pricing moments, disaster risk cannot explain the range of equity premia and government bill rates nor the high degree of equity return correlation found in the data. Moreover, the independence of disasters presumed in some studies generates counterfactually low cross-country correlations in equity markets. Alternatively, if disasters are all shared, the model generates correlations that are excessively high. We show that common and idiosyncratic components of disaster risk are needed to explain the pattern in consumption and equity co-movements.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2017.