Typical models of bankruptcy and collateral rely on incomplete asset markets. In fact, bankruptcy and collateral add contingencies to asset markets. In some models, these contingencies can be used by consumers to achieve the same equilibrium allocations as in models with complete markets. In...

Pecuniary externalities have regained the interest of researchers as they seek policy interventions and regulations to remedy externality-induced distortions, e.g., balance sheet effects, amplifiers and fire sales. In this paper we go back to first principles and show how to design financial...

This paper studies a competitive general equilibrium model with default and endogenous collateralized contracts. The possibility of trade in spot markets creates externalities, as spot prices and the bindingness of collateral constraints interact. We propose a market based solution which...

Can public insurance through redistributive income taxation improve the allocation of risk in an economy in which private risk sharing is limited? The answer depends crucially on the fundamental friction that limits private risk sharing in the first place. If risk sharing is incomplete because...

We consider the effect of excluding government investment from the deficit subject to the limits of the European Stability and Growth Pact. In the model we consider, residents of a given country discount future costs and benefits of government spending more than efficiency would dictate, because...

International financial integration helps to diversify risk but also may increase the trans- mission of crises across countries. We provide a quantitative analysis of this trade-off in a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous portfolio choice and collateral con- straints....

We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and play a major role in driving asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences and a single state variable drives the...

The hypothesis that Sudden Stops to capital inflows in emerging economies may be caused by global capital market frictions, such as collateral constraints and trading costs, suggests that Sudden Stops could be prevented by offering price guarantees on the emerging-markets asset class. Providing...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption...

We develop a macroeconomic model with physical and human capital, human capital risk, and limited contract enforcement. We show analytically that young (high-return) households are the most exposed to human capital risk and are also the least insured. We document this risk-insurance pattern in...