Excerpt
Excerpt
Safe Assets. Robert Barro, 2014, Paper. "A safe asset is one whose real value is insulated from shocks, including declines in GDP associated with rare macroeconomic disasters. However, in a Lucas-tree world, the aggregate risk is given by the specified process for GDP and cannot be altered by the creation of safe assets. Therefore, in the equilibrium of a representative-agent version of this economy, the quantity of safe assets will effectively be nil. With heterogeneity in coefficients of relative risk aversion, safe assets may take the form of private bond issues from low-risk-aversion agents to high-risk-aversion agents..." Link