Income Volatility and Portfolio Choices (Revised September 2020)

Based on administrative data from Statistics Norway, we find economically significant shifts in households' financial portfolios around individual structural breaks in labor-income volatility. According to our estimates, when income risk doubles, households reduce their risky share of financial assets by 5 percentage points, thus tempering their overall risk exposure. We show that our estimated risky share response is consistent with a standard portfolio choice model augmented with idiosyncratic, time-varying income volatility.