Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact on market performance depends on whether household inefficiencies are caused by inefficient net trades with the market or by inefficient distribution of resources within households. Inefficient...

We study the role of expectations of naive agents in a general equilibrium version of the Ramsey model with quasi-hyperbolic discounting. When agents recognize others' naivete, as strongly suggested by empirical evidence, they revise consumption paths, correctly anticipating prices in a...

Equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents and aggregate uncertainty are difficult to analyze since policy functions and market prices depend on the cross-sectional distribution over agents' state variables which is generally a high-dimensional object. This paper develops and applies a general...

In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this...

We analyze whether different learning abilities of firms with respect to general equilibrium effects lead to different levels of unemployment. We consider a general equilibrium model where firms in one sector compete à la Cournot and a real wage rigidity leads to unemployment. If firms consider...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

A rational-expectations equilibrium with positive demand for financial information does exist under fully revealing asset price - contrary to a wide-held conjecture. Generalizing the common additive signal-return model with CARA utility to the family of distributions with moment generating...

This paper investigates the positive international spillover effects of non-discriminatory product regulations, such as quality standards. We incorporate regulations into a multi-country general equilibrium framework with firm heterogeneity and variable markups. We model regulations as a...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...