The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based...

When people share risk in financial markets, intermediaries provide costly enforcement for most trades and, hence, are an integral part of financial markets' organization. We assess the degree of risk sharing that can be achieved through financial markets when enforcement is based on the threat...

In this paper, the issue of strategic behavior in the presence of environmental regulations and international trade is investigated. In a two-country, one-good, two-producer model as in Ulph (1996), we analyze the Nash equilibrium of the game where governments may behave strategically in...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

Does the Pareto criterion discriminate among policy choices when the policymaker does not know the correct model of the economy? If the policymaker can specify ex ante preferences for each agent, there will typically be some policy change that improves the welfare of each agent relative to a...

This paper examines the welfare of consumers in an incomplete markets economy with extrinsic uncertainty. It is shown that the utility of one consumer may be minimized at the Walrasian allocation relative to all other equilibrium allocations for a given security structure. Thus, this consumer...

The goal of this paper is to determine the effects of different social security regimes on job search. A less generous pension system induces higher savings across the life cycle and makes agents wealthier and thus more reluctant to accept low wage offers. On the other hand, as the social...

We study a model with a durable good subject to abrupt, periodic obsolescence, and characterize the optimal purchasing policy. Consumers optimally synchronize new purchases with the arrival of new durable models. Hence, some agents use a "flexible" optimal replacement rule that switches between...

This paper presents a model developed to explain the life-cycle patterns in both homeownership and portfolio allocation, and the relationship between them, using a model of rational agents. Two key innovations are incorporated into this model. First, housing is explicitly modeled as both a...

Mortgages are one-sided contracts under which the borrower may terminate the contract at any time, while the lender must commit to honoring the terms of the contract throughout its life. There are two aspects to this feature of the contract that are modeled in this paper. The first is that the...