We develop a novel argument why better public information can help countries to insure against idiosyncratic risk. Representative agents of developing and industrial countries receive public and private signals on their future income realization and engage in risk-sharing contracts with limited...

This paper formalizes the idea that more hedging instruments may destabilize markets when traders are heterogeneous and adapt their behavior according to experience based reinforcement learning. We investigate three different economic settings, a simple mean-variance asset pricing model, a...

This paper argues that the introduction of a short-sale constraint in the Arrow-Radner frameworkinvalidates standard definitions of complete and incomplete markets. In this constrained set-up,two threshold values with familiar properties arise.The case of a zero short-sale bound set on some...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures crucially depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings, wealth and time-invariant unobserved characteristics such as permanent income and over-confidence. To explain this evidence, we develop...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings and wealth. To explain this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a standard-incomplete markets model in which rational households...

We investigate whether US households possess advance information about their future income and what this means for consumption insurance. Based on insights from a theoretical model, we propose a new test to detect advance information, which requires only panel data on consumption and income....

Limited liability may result in inefficient accident prevention, because a relevant portion of the expected harm is externalized on victims. This paper shows that under some restrictive conditions further limiting liability by means of a liability cap can improve caretaking.

Should loss of earnings be compensated? The established law and economics wisdom considers pure economic loss as a transfer of wealth from the victim to a third party, whose earnings increase as a consequence of the accident. Such transfers do not amount to a social loss and, hence, should not...

For joint liability problems concerning tort law, a legal compensation scheme may be based on lower and upper bounds of compensation for injury and on case-system consistency. Introducing several properties inspired from this observation, we analyze compensation schemes axiomatically under the...