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. Our contribution analyses whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life....

This paper presents a monetary explanation for several business-cycle facts: (i) household and business investment are procyclical, (ii) business investment lags household investment, (iii) household investment is positively correlated with M1, and (iv) household credit outstanding is positively...

A major source of insurance coverage for non-elderly adults in the US is employer-based health insurance market. Every participant of this market gets a tax subsidy since premiums are excluded from taxable income. However, people have different incentives to participate in the employer-based...

I present a model of optimal contracts between firms and workers, under limited commitment and with worker savings. A central feature of the model is that firms can provide insurance against unemployment, by targeting a path of wages that encourages wealth accumulation. I provide an analytical...

These lecture notes are about financial innovations. We ask why are there some innovation and how is an innovative idea realized. This forces us to consider practical and structural aspects (regulations, taxation, markets) as key drivers of innovations and also basic formal aspects in valuation....

Two key components of the upcoming health reform in the U.S. are a new regulation of the individual health insurance market and an increase in income redistribution in the economy. Which component contributes more to the welfare outcome of the reform? We address this question by constructing a...

In a dynamic general equilibrium model with credit constraints and heterogeneous firms I show that both tax policies and domestic financial market development (FD) can lead to lower informality. Tax policies are more effective in reducing informality since they directly increase the cost of...

The aim of this paper is to prove that if the consumption set of an economy with incomplete financial markets is semi-algebraic, then the corresponding pseudo-equilibrium manifold is also semi-algebraic. For this, we proceed by constructing an incomplete financial economy with real assets and...

The existing theoretical analysis of microfinance focuses on the nature of the loan contract such as group liability. We draw attention to the role of missing or imperfect labor market in understanding some of the important `second generation' debates in microfinance. Our analysis helps explain...

We consider the indifference valuation of an uncertain monetary payoff from the perspective of an uncertainty averse decision maker. We study how the indifference valuation depends on the decision maker’s attitudes toward uncertainty. We obtain a characterization of comparative uncertainty...