Learning with Rare Disasters

Download or read book Learning with Rare Disasters written by Jessica A. Wachter and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial crises appear to have long-lasting effects, even after the crisis itself has past. This paper offers a simple explanation through Bayesian learning from rare events. Agents face a latent and time-varying probability of economic disaster. When a disaster occurs, learning results in greater effects on asset prices because agents update their probability of future disasters. Moreover, agents' belief that the disaster risk is high can rationally persist for years, even when it is in fact low. We generalize the model to allow for a noisy signal of the disaster probability. This generalized model explains excess stock market volatility together with negative skewness, effects that previous models in the literature struggle to explain.