Endogenous second moments: A unified approach to fluctuations in risk, dispersion, and uncertainty

We explore a mechanism by which second moments—such as cross-sectional dispersions, risk, volatility, or uncertainty—naturally and endogenously fluctuate over time as nonlinear transformations of fundamentals. Specifically, we provide theoretical results that characterize second moments of transform...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Straub, L. (Author), Ulbricht, R. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Academic Press Inc. 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 01803nam a2200217Ia 4500
001 10.1016-j.jet.2019.07.007
008 220511s2019 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 00220531 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a Endogenous second moments: A unified approach to fluctuations in risk, dispersion, and uncertainty 
260 0 |b Academic Press Inc.  |c 2019 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2019.07.007 
520 3 |a We explore a mechanism by which second moments—such as cross-sectional dispersions, risk, volatility, or uncertainty—naturally and endogenously fluctuate over time as nonlinear transformations of fundamentals. Specifically, we provide theoretical results that characterize second moments of transformed random variables when the underlying fundamentals are subject to distributional shifts that affect their means, but not their variances. We illustrate the usefulness of our results with a series of applications. Our main application concerns the cross-sectional dispersions of output, employment, and Solow residuals, which we show to become countercyclical if employment and capital are gross complements. The mechanism can account for a significant share of the empirical cyclicality patterns, without exogenous shocks to volatilities. In additional applications we use our theory to study endogenous fluctuations in the dispersion of MRPKs, in risk in security pricing, and in uncertainty in Bayesian inference problems. © 2019 Elsevier Inc. 
650 0 4 |a Cross-sectional dispersion 
650 0 4 |a Endogenous uncertainty 
650 0 4 |a Monotone likelihood ratio property 
650 0 4 |a Nonlinear transformations 
650 0 4 |a Risk 
650 0 4 |a Second moments 
700 1 |a Straub, L.  |e author 
700 1 |a Ulbricht, R.  |e author 
773 |t Journal of Economic Theory