Social Risk, Fiscal Risk, and the Portfolio of Government Programs Samuel G. Hanson David S. Scharfstein Adi Sunderam Harvard Business School June 2018 Abstract We develop a model of government portfolio choice in which a benevolent government chooses the scale of risky projects in the presence of market failures and tax distortions. These two frictions generate motives to manage social risk and fiscal risk. Social risk man- agement makes attractive programs that ameliorate market failures in bad economic times. Fiscal risk management makes unattractive programs that entail large government outlays at times when other programs in the government’sportfolio also require large outlays. We characterize the determinants of social and fiscal risk and argue that these two risk man- agement motives often conflict. Using the model, we explore how the attractiveness of different financial stability programs varies with the government’s fiscal burden and with characteristics of the economy. Corresponding author: Adi Sunderam, Harvard Business School, Baker Library 359, Boston, MA 02163, asun-
[email protected], (617) 495-6644. We thank Andy Abel, John Campbell, George Constantinides, Eduardo Davilla, Itay Goldstein (editor), Martin Oehmke, Guillermo Ordonez, Thomas Philippon, Julio Rotemberg, Jeremy Stein, Matt Weinzierl, three anonymous referees and seminar participants at Columbia, Chicago, Duke, Harvard, Kel- logg, NYU, Princeton, Wharton, and the NBER Corporate Finance Summer Institute for helpful comments. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Harvard Business School Division of Research. 1 Introduction In modern economies, a significant fraction of economy-wide risk is borne indirectly by taxpayers via the government. Governments have significant explicit and implicit liabilities associated with retirement benefits, social insurance programs, and financial system backstops.