The fiscal theory of the price level asserts that the price level is determined by the ratio of outstanding public nominal debt into the present value of real primary budget surpluses of the government. We here argue that the logic of the fiscal theory fails when at least part of the public debt...

This Paper investigates the relationship between risk and productive activity and the degree of financial intermediation in a model with moral hazard. Entreprenuers can simultaneously get credit from two types of competing institutions: ‘financial intermediaries’ and ‘local lenders’. The...

We prove indeterminacy of competitive equilibrium in sequential economies, where limited commitment requires the endogenous determination of solvency constraints preventing debt repudiation (Alvarez and Jermann (2000)). In particular, we show that, for any arbitrary value of social welfare in...

We consider (possibly non-stationary) economies with endogenous solvency constraints under uncertainty over an infinite horizon, as in Alvarez and Jermann (2000) [5]. A sort of Cass Criterion (Cass, 1972 [10]) completely characterizes constrained inefficiency under the hypothesis of uniform...

We study competitive equilibrium in sequential economies under limited commitment. Default induces permanent exclusion from financial markets and endogenously determined solvency constraints prevent debt repudiation. Our analysis shows that such an enforcement mechanism is essentially fragile,...