Is risk good for saving? Message from the general equilibrium model

Popular press and some practitioners have warned against threats that buying risky

assets pose on agents saving for retirement, children education and other uses. This pa-

per shows that in a standard two-period general equilibrium model where some savers

have no risk-sharing motives, there exists a non-negligible set of economies (endow-

ments) and equilibria at which every economic agent is better off if some risky assets

are added to riskless securities. Numerical examples actually show that the measure of

the set of economies (endowments) with equilibrium allocations associated with trading

risky assets that are Pareto superior to when there are only riskless assets can be larger

than half the measure of the full set of economies.