Person: Vergara, Marcos
Loading...
Email Address
Birth Date
2 results
¿Qué estás buscando?
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Publication New results on precautionary saving and nonlinear risks(2022) Vergara, Marcos; Bonilla, ClaudioWe study precautionary saving in a two-period model that allows for nonlinear risks and nonseparable preferences. Permitting nonlinear risk effects is important because they are common in the developing world or when worldwide shocks hit economies, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Allowing nonseparable preferences is also important because they admit the incorporation of intergenerational transfer, habit persistence and other specific features of intertemporal decision making. We decompose the risk shock using Davis’s (Int Econ Rev 30(1):131–136, 1989) compensation method and analyze the income and substitution effect of an increase in risk. We prove that the substitution effect is always negative and, therefore, the income effect must be positive and larger in size to have a precautionary net effect. We then apply the method to various sources of risk, such as income, interest rate and wealth risk. We analyze the magnitude of each effect and find the conditions required to guarantee precautionary saving in each case. Our results are presented as signs of covariances, which provides a new perspective on precautionary saving.Publication Hybrid entrepreneurship and risk(2024) Benitez, Ignacia; Bonilla, Claudio A.; Vergara, MarcosIn this paper, we study the impact of risk on time allocation decisions between occupations by modeling a hybrid entrepreneur who must decide how to allocate time between paid employment (labor) and working on a venture (entrepreneurship). We argue that hybrid entrepreneurs self-insure in response to income risk by managing the time they allocate between the two occupations. We provide the conditions under which an uninsurable risk (in paid employment or the entrepreneurial sector) has an unambiguous precautionary effect on the optimal time allocated to each occupation, and these conditions are based on the strengths of risk aversion and downside risk aversion. We focus on three cases: when risk affects only the entrepreneurial sector, which is the classical case studied in the occupational choice literature; when risk affects only the paid employment sector; and finally, when risk affects both sectors, as we experienced during the recent pandemic.