We consider a Lucas asset-pricing model with heterogeneous agents, exogenous labor income, and a finite number of exogenous shocks. Although agents are infinitely lived, endowments and dividends are time-invariant functions of the exogenous shock alone and are thus restricted to lie in a...

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,...

We characterize equilibria with endogenous debt constraints for a general equilibrium economy with limited commitment in which the only consequence of default is losing the ability to borrow in future periods. First, we show that equilibrium debt limits must satisfy a simple condition that...

Typical models of bankruptcy and collateral rely on incomplete asset markets. In fact, bankruptcy and collateral add contingencies to asset markets. In some models, these contingencies can be used by consumers to achieve the same equilibrium allocations as in models with complete markets. In...

The transactions and production files are used to create measures of the use of currency and crop inventory as well as changes in real capital assets, livestock, and net indebtedness for three ICRISAT villages in India's semiarid tropics. These asset data are used with income and consumption...

This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...

Economies with asymmetric information are encompassed by an extension of the model of general competitive equilibrium that does not require an explicit modeling of private information. Sellers have discretion over deliveries on contracts; this is in common with economies with default, incomplete...

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...

When infinite-lived agents trade long-lived assets secured by durable goods, equilibrium exists without any additional debt constraints or uniform impatience conditions on agents’ characteristics. Also, price bubbles are absent when physical endowments are uniformly bounded away from zero.

This article examines agents’ consumption-investment problem in a multi-period pure exchange economy where agents are constrained with the short-sale of state-dependent risky contingent claims. In equilibrum, agents hold options written on aggregate consumption in their optimal portfolios....