Monday, January 5, 2009

Markets for Macro Risks: Early Shiller

Whenever I think about designing markets on which individuals can hedge big risks, I think about the remarkable market-design work of Robert Shiller. It's not his recent bestsellers that I'm thinking of as much as his 1993 Clarendon Lectures, Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's Largest Economic Risks. It called for the creation, among other things, of what became the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, that allow large movements in residential real estate to be hedged.

His web pages on what he calls Financial Democracy, and its associated references and links, are well worth looking at.

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