We study competitive equilibrium in sequential economies under limited commitment. Default induces permanent exclusion from financial markets and endogenously determined solvency constraints prevent debt repudiation. Our analysis shows that such an enforcement mechanism is essentially fragile,...

The transactions and production files are used to create measures of the use of currency and crop inventory as well as changes in real capital assets, livestock, and net indebtedness for three ICRISAT villages in India's semiarid tropics. These asset data are used with income and consumption...

Various mechanism design models are used to study the allocation of risk and the allocation of productive resources in one ICRISAT village of India's semiarid tropics. This is done with the use of a specialty data base which tracked intensively the operation of a salient village institution. A...

This paper studies competitive equilibria in economies characterized by the presence of asymmetric information, where non-exclusive contracts are traded on competitive markets and agents may be privately informed over their payoff. For such economies competitive equilibria may not exist when...

This paper considers a matching model in which multiple steady-state unemployment rates exist if government expenditures and unemployment benefits are high enough. The focus on the extensive margin and a possible transition to a steady state with higher unemployment rates imply that the effect...

Two key components of the recent U.S. health reform 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 general...

Starr-McCluer (1996) documented an empirical finding showing that US households covered by health insurance saved more than those without coverage, which is inconsistent with the standard consumption-saving theory. This study conducts a structural analysis and suggests that institutional...

I study the asset pricing implications and the efficiency of a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets along the lines of Krebs [Krebs, T., 2003. Human Capital Risk and Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(2),...

The life-cycle patterns of consumption, wage and hours inequality observed in U.S. cross-section data are commonly viewed as incompatible with a Pareto efficient allocation. We determine the extent to which these qualitative and quantitative patterns can or cannot be produced by Pareto efficient...

Many recent papers in macroeconomics have studied the implications of models with household heterogeneity and incomplete financial markets under the assumption that households own the stock of physical capital and undertake the intertemporal investment decisions. In these models, production...