While it is recognized that the family is primarily an institution for risk sharing, little is known about the quantitative effects of this informal source of insurance on savings and labor supply. In this paper, we present a model where workers (females and males) are subject to idiosyncratic...

We study the value of information in a competitive economy in which agents trade in asset markets to reallocate risk. We characterize the kinds of information that allow a welfare improvement when portfolios can be freely reallocated. We then compare competitive equilibria before and after a...

We decompose the Backus-Smith [1993] statistic -- a low or negative correlation between relative consumption and the real exchange rate at odds with a high degree of international risk sharing -- in its dynamic components at di¤erent frequencies. Using multivariate spectral analysis techniques...

We study the dynamic Ramsey problem of finding optimal public debt and linear taxes on capital and labor income within a tractable infinite horizon model with incomplete markets. With zero public expenditure and debt, it is optimal to tax the risky labor income and subsidize capital, while a...

This paper analyzes a class of competitive economies with production, incomplete financial markets, and agency frictions. Firms take their production, financing, and contractual decisions so as to maximize their value under rational conjectures. We show that competitive equilibria exist and that...

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation, and study the problem of determining the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of the debt level. We show both analytically and numerically that...

We study a general equilibrium model in which firms choose their capital structure optimally, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. The costs of default are endogenous: bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their assets, resulting in a fire sale if there is...

At a competitive equilibrium of an incomplete-markets economy agents’ marginal valuations for the tradable assets are equalized ex-ante. We characterize the finest partition of the state space conditional on which this equality holds for any economy. This leads naturally to a necessary and...

We study a general equilibrium model with production where financial markets are incomplete. At a competitive equilibrium firms take their production and financial decisions so as to maximize their value. We show that shareholders unanimously support value maximization. Furthermore, competitive...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms’ assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...