This paper deals with the role of bubbles, having the same meaning as Ponzi games, for implementing efficient growth paths in a closed economy overlapping generations model. It is shown that the well-known arbitrage condition for bubbles, namely that they must yield the same return in...

A variety of empirical and theoretical evidence published in recent years suggests that frictions in credit markets are crucial to understand the monetary transmission mechanism. The objective of this paper is to provide a quantitative evaluation of the credit view interpretation of this...

This paper presents a full model of the Credit Channel of the monetary transmission mechanism. In particular, the special role of the banking sector is derived endogenously and special attention is paid to the role of borrowers' net worth. A debt contracting problem with asymmetric information...

It will be shown that for rational players with a sufficiently large time horizon it is advantageous to keep promises and not to cheat even if cheating is the optimal behaviour in the short run. This explains why ethics could develop in a market economy where incentives to cheat are ubiquitous.

The following question is analyzed: under what circumstances can one a stable (i.e., time invariant) functional relationship which links aggregate consumption in period t with aggregate income in period t and another "determinants" of consumtion that refer to periods prior to period t and can be...

The paper is about the economic modelling of aggregate consumption expenditure with particular emphasis on the distribution effects of income. Under certain assumptions on the evolution over time of the population of households ("structural stability") we shall derive a first order approximation...

It is shown how one can effectively use microdata in modelling the change over time in an aggregate (e.g. mean consumption expenditure) of a large and heterogeneous population. The starting point of our aggregation analysis is a specification of explanatory variables on the micro-level....