In this paper we study the quantitative properties of alternative social security regimes in a large overlapping generations model where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We study this issue in two model economies. The first is the standard one characterized by exogenous...

This paper quantifies the size of precautionary savings implied by a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents when explicitly considering the labor supply decision of households. I find that precautionary savings are smaller than if they were measured by use of a model economy...

This paper examines how policies affect people's welfare during business cycles when markets are incomplete. In particular, we analyze cyclical policies such as cyclical taxation and cyclical unemployment insurance. Those policies play two roles: smoothing the income (and consumption) process...

In this paper we demonstrate that different incomplete markets models yield qualitatively distinct predictions about how consumption growth responds to declines and increases in earnings. Markets are either exogenously incomplete in that households can only trade a risk-free bond, subject to a...

When financial markets are incomplete, shareholders will in general disagree on the optimal level of investment to be undertaken by the firm (Grossman and Hart, 1979). Macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets (e.g. Krusell and Smith, 1998) usually ignore this issue...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer" struggling to smooth government outlays given the randomness of public revenues in a world with "liability dollarization" in which they can only issue debt denominated in hard currencies, or indexed to tradable goods prices....

The present project introduces the possibility of default on the trading contracts in an infinite horizon incomplete markets model, relaxing the usual assumption made in the literature with respect to the trading limits, which are chosen to be fixed or independent of the characteristics of the...

An unresolved issue in international macroeconomics is the apparent lack of risk-sharing across countries, which contradicts the prediction of models based on the assumption of complete markets. We asses the importance of international financial frictions in this issue by constructing an...