This paper studies the determinants of inequality in an infnitehorizon general equilibrium model. Missing capital markets decreases motivations for capital accumulation among the poor, while uncertainty about future income leads to precautionary savings. The different returns to saving faced by...

This paper analyses the default option typical to American mortgages. Households borrow to buy durable housing, but future house prices are uncertain, and households find it dvantageous to default on their debt if house prices fall sufficiently. A key assumption of the model is that households...

In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state-specific output shocks. Thus, marriages do not just improve the allocation of risk at the...

An intertemporal optimal strategy for accumulation of reversible capital and management of an exhaustible resource is analyzed for a global economy when resource depletion generates discharges that add to a stock pollutant that affects the likelihood for hitting a tipping point or threshold of...

This paper considers a sequence of discrete-time random walk markets with a single risky asset, and gives conditions for the existence of arbitrage opportunities or free lunches with vanishing risk, of the form of waiting to buy and selling the next period, with no shorting, and furthermore for...

A maximum principle is proved for certain problems of continuous time stochastic control with hard end constraints, (end constraints satis_ed a.s.) After establishing a general theorem, the results are applied to problems where the state equation (di_erential equation) changes at certain...

n an infinite horizon optimal control problem, the Hamiltonian vanishes at the infinite horizon, when the differential equation is autonomous. The integrand in the integral criterion may contain the time explicitly, but it has to satisfy certain integrability conditions. A generalization of...

The contributions of the paper are threefold: i) compare with mathematical rigour the Charnes, Cooper, and Rhodes DEA model and the Farrell model exhibiting constant returns to scale, ii) reinterpret the contribution of Farrell and Fieldhouse that extended the analysis to variables returns to...

Piecewise deterministic control problems are problems involving stochastic disturbance of a special type. In certain situations, in an otherwise deterministic control system, it may happen that the state jumps at certain stochastic points of time. Examples are sudden oil finds, or sudden...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...