Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets

It is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory argues t...

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Main Authors: Mukerji, S, Tallon, J
Format: Working paper
Published: University of Oxford 2000
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author Mukerji, S
Tallon, J
author_facet Mukerji, S
Tallon, J
author_sort Mukerji, S
collection OXFORD
description It is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory argues that diversification would reduce the inconvenience of idiosyncratic risk to arbitrarily low levels. This argument is less robust than what standard theory leads us to believe: ambiguity aversion can exacerbate the tension between the two kinds of risk to the point that classes of agents may not want to trade some financial assets. Thus, theoretically , the effect of ambiguity aversion on financial markets is to make the risk sharing opportunities offered by financial markets less complete than it would be otherwise.
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spelling oxford-uuid:bcfb5f45-7ba4-44bc-a6c5-8c3036f43bef2022-03-27T05:28:26ZAmbiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial marketsWorking paperhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_8042uuid:bcfb5f45-7ba4-44bc-a6c5-8c3036f43befSymplectic ElementsBulk import via SwordUniversity of Oxford2000Mukerji, STallon, JIt is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory argues that diversification would reduce the inconvenience of idiosyncratic risk to arbitrarily low levels. This argument is less robust than what standard theory leads us to believe: ambiguity aversion can exacerbate the tension between the two kinds of risk to the point that classes of agents may not want to trade some financial assets. Thus, theoretically , the effect of ambiguity aversion on financial markets is to make the risk sharing opportunities offered by financial markets less complete than it would be otherwise.
spellingShingle Mukerji, S
Tallon, J
Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title_full Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title_fullStr Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title_full_unstemmed Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title_short Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
title_sort ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets
work_keys_str_mv AT mukerjis ambiguityaversionandincompletenessoffinancialmarkets
AT tallonj ambiguityaversionandincompletenessoffinancialmarkets