Adriano Rampini
Bio sketch: Adriano Rampini is a Professor of Finance and Economics in the finance area at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business with a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics and is the Lewis Cook III Research Fellow. Professor Rampini received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1998 and was on the faculty at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management prior to joining Fuqua in 2006. Professor Rampini’s expertise is in financial economics and macroeconomics. He has studied the procyclical nature of capital reallocation as well as the variation of entrepreneurial activity and default over the business cycle. He has also shown that financially constrained firms lease capital assets instead of buying them and buy used capital assets instead of new ones. His recent work considers the dynamics of risk management and explains why poorly capitalized firms typically do not engage in risk management, a fact previously considered a puzzle. He is also studying household risk management, the role of collateral in determining the capital structure, and the effect of the capitalization of financial intermediaries on financing and the macro economy. In addition, he is interested in the role of government.
Professor Rampini’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Economic Theory. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, was an invited speaker at the Review of Economic Studies European Meetings, and received the 2008 Jensen Second Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of corporate finance and organizations. He currently serves as the President of the Finance Theory Group and as a Director of the Western Finance Association. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He was a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and New York and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, in the department of economics at MIT, and in the finance area at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics and Associate of the Department in the department of economics at Harvard University.
Abstract: Household risk management, that is, households’ insurance against adverse shocks to income, assets, and financing needs, is limited and often completely absent, in particular for poor households. We explain this basic pattern in household insurance in an infinite horizon model in which households have access to complete markets subject to collateral constraints resulting in a trade-off between the financing needs for consumption and durable goods purchases and risk management concerns. We show that household risk management is monotone in household net worth and income, under quite general conditions, in economies with income risk, durable goods, and durable goods price risk. The limited participation in marketsfor claims which allow household risk management is a result of the financing risk management trade-off and should not be considered a puzzle.
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