We test for the existence of housing bubbles associated with a failure of the transversality condition that requires the present value of payments occurring infinitely far in the future to be zero. The most prominent such bubble is the classic rational bubble. We study housing markets in the...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used in intermediating the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

What contributes to the growing income inequality across U.S. households? We develop an information- based general equilibrium model that links capital income derived from financial assets to a level of investor sophistication. Our model implies income inequality between sophisticated and...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

Recent scandals over the manipulation of LIBOR and foreign exchange benchmarks have spurred policy discussions of the appropriate design of financial benchmarks. We solve a version of the problem faced by a financial benchmark administrator. Acting as a mechanism designer, the benchmark...