Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...

Financing government spending through lump sum taxes does not distort capital when markets are complete but tends to increase precautionary savings under market incompleteness. Using flat consumption taxes instead leaves precautionary savings unaffected, provided certain conditions on utility...

This paper shows that grid-based numerical solutions to models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty are sensitive to the number and placement of grid points in the aggregate asset holdings direction. Higher moments of the cross-sectional distribution of asset holdings can be...

A simple Monte Carlo calibration approach is implemented in a GE model with uninsurable employment risk to quantitatively study the optimal replacement rate of a public unemployment insurance (UI) scheme. The optimal UI sampling distribution is found to be bimodal.

Measuring the psychic return of art investments is a debated issue in cultural economics. Several works suggest Jensen’s alpha as a measure of the psychic return. Since Jensen’s alpha is defined in the CAPM framework, its uncritical application as a measure of the psychic return may be...

We study financial risk taking via standard and sophisticated financial investments. Using survey data on 2,047 individuals, we find that standard investments are strongly associated with both actual and perceived financial literacy for men, but only with actual literacy for women. Sophisticated...

People have the natural tendency to be optimistic and believe that good outcomes in the future are more likely, but also want to avoid overestimation that could result in bad decision-making. Brunnermeier, Brunnermeier and Parker (2005) and Brunnermeier et al. (2007) established an optimal...

Credit cards offer a limit, rather than a specific loan size, at a pre-approved interest rate. This paper studies the determination of these credit limits jointly with default in the presence of one-period debt. I adapt the standard incomplete markets macroeconomic model of one-period unsecured...

I explore an alternative mortgage contract that limits negative equity by tying outstanding debt to an index of house prices. This is done in an incomplete markets model, that is calibrated to match US micro- and macro-data. I find that switching from a non-recourse contract to an indexed...

In a general equilibrium model with at least three goods, a perfectly price-discriminating monopoly (PDM) selects an inefficient production plan even if consumers are homogenous, their preferences are representable by quasi-linear utilities, and their characteristics are known to the monopolist....