We consider the impact of history on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods, whose quality is learned slowly. If the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers, a sufficiently bad run of luck could induce her to stop selling. When she knows...

This paper studies a dynamic model of a financial market with N strategic agents. Agents receive random stock endowments at each period and trade to share dividend risk. Endowments are the only private information in the model. We find that agents trade slowly even when the time between trades...

Motivated by the success of internal habit formation preferences in explaining asset pricing puzzles, we introduce these preferences in a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with liquidity constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and stock-market participation costs. In...

We solve a model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents that generates a large equity premium, while simultaneously matching stock market participation and individual asset holdings. The high risk premium is driven by incomplete risk sharing among stockholders, which results from the...

This paper solves an empirically parameterized model of households’ optimal demand for nominal and inflation indexed annuities. The model incorporates mortality, inflation, and real interest rate risk. The model draws some interesting predictions. First, the welfare calculations on the access...

This paper considers the asset-allocation strategies open to members of defined- contribution pension plans. We investigate a model that incorporates three sources of risk: asset risk and salary (or labour-income) risk in the accumulation phase; and interest-rate risk at the point of retirement....

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...

This paper proposes a general way to conceive public policy when there is no consensual account of the situation of interest. The approach builds on an extension and dual formulation of the traditional theory of economic policy. It does not need a representative policymaker’s utility function...

This paper reviews fundamental concepts in environmental economics and explores theoretical results regarding the choice of the key policy instruments for the control of externalities: taxes, subsidies and marketable permits. The paper explains why today market mechanisms are increasingly being...

This paper examines the key design mechanisms of existing and proposed cap-and-trade markets. First, it is shown that the hybrid systems under investigation (price floor using a minimum price guarantee, price collar, allowance reserve, options offered by the regulator, and offset relaxation) can...