We examine asset prices in a representative-agent model of general equilibrium. Assuming only that individuals are risk … averse, we determine conditions on the changes in asset risk that are both necessary and sufficient for the asset price to … incomplete in the sense of containing an uninsurable background risk, such as a risk on labor income. We extend our model to show …

to college households in terms of welfare. Chapter 2 disentangles the effect of demographic change on returns to risk …. Chapter 3 develops a method for computing transitional dynamics in heterogeneous agent models with aggregate risk if these …

aggregate risk. We argue that interactions between the two risks are important for this question. One is a direct interaction in … the form of a countercyclical variance of idiosyncratic income risk. The other indirectly emerges over a household's life …-cycle because retirement savings contain the history of idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. We show that this leads to risk …