Has Globalization Improved International Risk Sharing?

In this paper, we study the dynamics of international consumption risk sharing among the G-7 countries. Based on the dynamic conditional correlation model due to Engle (2002), we construct a time-varying, consumption-based measure of risk sharing. We find that the exposure to country-specific shocks has evolved heterogeneously across the G-7 countries and that risk sharing varies procyclically with the output gap. This dependence on the business cycle is especially pronounced in countries where credit constraints are relatively binding.