Using Italian household data we jointly estimate the yearly cost of participating to the stock market and the cross sectional distribution of optimism about excess returns of stocks over bonds. Using mean-variance analysis we derive individual efficient portfolio allocation rules, as functions...

The “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005†makes extensive changes to U.S. consumer bankruptcy regulations. One of its most important features is to prohibit debtors from filing under Chapter 7 when some or all of a debtor’s unsecured liability can be...

Bankruptcy (defaulting on one's debts) acts as insurance if it allows default in cases of negative income shocks. However, if debts are not fully recoverable, lenders may instead react by limiting the amount that they allow households to borrow. This upper borrowing limit will increase as the...

The quintessential crime of the information age is identity theft, the malicious use of personal identifying data. In this paper we provide a model of “identity†and its use in credit transactions. In the environments we construct, various types of identity theft occur in equilibrium,...

Following Diamond and Dybvig (1983), bank runs in the literature take the form of withdrawals of demand deposits payable in real goods, which deplete a fixed reserve of goods in the banking system. This paper examines modern bank runs, in which withdrawals typically take the form of wire...

This paper offers a novel positive theory of counterfeit money, in which the counterfeiters compete against both law enforcement and innocent individuals forced to verify their currency. Law enforcement efforts against counterfeiting can crowd out verification, and thus have perverse...

This paper studies a remarkable experiment in monetary policy. Because of the peculiarity of the French monetary system, the government was able to engineer overnight appreciations of the currency in terms of silver of 100% over a few months, with the explicit goal of lowering the price level....