Accounting for the pervasive evidence of limited international risk sharing is an important hurdle for open-economy models, especially when these are adopted in the analysis of policy trade-offs likely to be affected by imperfections in financial markets. Key to the literature is the evidence,...

This Paper evaluates the welfare implications of policy rules when international financial markets are incomplete. Using a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets, price stickiness and monopolistic competition, one finds that an allocation in which the producer...

This paper simplifies Merton’s (1973) fund separation theorem by showing that investors will hold hedge funds in their optimal portfolio only to hedge against changes in the slope or position of the instantaneous capital market line. This result allows for incomplete markets and does not...

In models with a large number of agents who have constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) preferences, the absence of insurance markets for idiosyncratic labour income risk has no effect on the premium for aggregate risk if the distribution of idiosyncratic risk is independent of aggregate shocks....

Countertrade agreements in international trade refer to a practice in which an exporter agrees to purchase in the future, from the importer, commodities proportional to his original export sale. The paper analyzes why it might be efficient for agents to undertake trade through a reciprocal...

We study two-period pure-exchange Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) economies, for given degrees of incompleteness of financial markets and given degrees of restricted participation of agents in the markets. We characterize the optimal financial market structure of this economy, as well as...

Can public insurance through redistributive income taxation improve the allocation of risk in an economy in which private risk sharing is limited? The answer depends crucially on the fundamental friction that limits private risk sharing in the first place. If risk sharing is incomplete because...

We use all available waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to document the evolution of the wealth distribution in the US since the 1980s. We then rely on the shape of this distribution to estimate a life-cycle incomplete markets model. We find that considering a wide range of net-worth...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with stochastic production and incomplete markets to assess whether the introduction of an unfunded social security system leads to a Pareto improvement. When returns to capital and wages are imperfectly correlated a system that endows retired...