Researchers have used stylized facts on asset prices and trading volume in stock markets (in particular, the mean reversion of asset returns and the correlations between trading volume, price changes and price levels) to support theories where agents are not rational expected utility maximizers....

In May 1927, the German central bank intervened indirectly to reduce lending to equity investors. The crash that followed ended the only stock market boom during Germany’s relative stabilization 1924-28. This paper examines the factors that lead to the intervention as well as its consequences....

We examine the conditions under which competitive equilibria can be obtained as the limit, when the number of strategic traders gets large, of Nash equilibria in economies with asymmetric information on agents' effort and possibly imperfect observability of agents' trades. Convergence always...

We analyze risk sharing and fiscal spending in a two-region model with complete markets. Fiscal policy determines tax rates for each state of nature. When fiscal policy is decentralized, it can be used to affect prices of securities. To manipulate prices to their beneffit, regions choose...

Price bubbles in an Arrow-Debreu valuation equilibrium in infinite-time economy are a manifestation of lack of countable additivity of valuation of assets. In contrast, known examples of price bubbles in sequential equilibrium in infinite time cannot be attributed to the lack of countable...

In this article we show that in the presence of trading constraints, such as short sale constraints, the standard definition of a Rational Expectations Equilibrium allows for equilibrium prices that reveal information unknown to any active trader in the market. We propose a new definition of the...

The objective of this note is to analyze some implications of the model of commodity money described in Banerjee and Maskin (1996) which may seem paradoxical. In order to do this, we incorporate a general production cost structure into the model. We focus on two different results. First, the...

In this paper we explore the accumulation of capital in the presence of limited insurance against idiosyncratic shocks, borrowing constraints and endogenous labor supply. As in the exogenous labor supply case (e.g. Aiyagari 1994, Huggett 1997), we find that steady states are characterized with...

\documentstyle[portada,11pt]{article} This paper shows that the presence of private information in an economy can be a source of market incompleteness even when it is feasible to issue a set of securities that completely eliminates the informational asymmetries in equilibrium. We analyze a...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...