Entrepreneurs often face undiversifiable idiosyncratic risks from their business investments. We extend the standard real options approach to an incomplete markets environment and analyze the joint decisions of business investments, consumption/savings, and portfolio selection. For a lump-sum...

We model the equilibrium price and quantity of risk transfer between firms and financial intermediaries. Value-maximizing firms have downward sloping demands to cede risk, while intermediaries, who assume risk, provide less-than-fully-elastic supply. We show that equilibrium required returns...

We analytically characterize asset-pricing and consumption behavior in two-account heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate risk. We show that trading frictions can simultaneously explain (1) household-level consumption behavior such as high marginal propensities to consume, (2) a zero-beta...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

The performance of a given portfolio policy can in principle be evaluated by comparing its expected utility with that of the optimal policy. Unfortunately, the optimal policy is usually not computable in which case a direct comparison is impossible. In this paper we solve this problem by using...

The existence of a natural resource curse has been a longstanding theme in the economic literature and in policy discussions. We propose an alternative mechanism and study its policy implications. The mechanism is based on the interaction between two building blocks: specialization in...

The "reversal interest rate" is the rate at which accommodative monetary policy reverses its intended effect and becomes contractionary for lending. It occurs when banks' asset revaluation from duration mismatch is more than offset by decreases in net interest income on new business, lowering...

We analyze conventional and unconventional monetary policies in a dynamic small open-economy model with financial frictions. In the model, financial intermediaries or banks borrow from the world market and lend to domestic households. Banks can borrow abroad up to a multiple of their equity; in...