This paper quantifies the macroeconomic implications of the lack of insurance against idiosyncratic labor market risk. I show that in a model economy calibrated to observed individual level data, households make ample use of work effort as a consumption smoothing mechanism. As a consequence,...

We study the effects of a social security reform in a large overlapping generations model where markets are incomplete and households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We depart from the previous literature by assuming that, because of lack of commitment in the credit market, the...

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...

We study the effect of borrowing limits on welfare in several versions of exchange and production economies. There is a "quantity" effect of a larger borrowing limit which is beneficial for liquidity constrained agents, but essentially irrelevant otherwise. There is also a ``price effect" which...

This paper studies the effects of financial policy in a model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets and portfolio restrictions. For an economy calibrated to replicate key aspects of the US wealth distribution, we find that the quantitative effects of financial policy are relatively...

We study the competitive equilibria of a two-country endogenous growth model in which the source of growth is the linearity of technology in reproducible inputs. We begin by showing that in a model with no externalities there is a unique equilibrium; however, there are multiple ways in which the...

This paper analyzes the welfare costs of business cycles when workers face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. In accordance with the previous literature, this paper decomposes labor income risk into an aggregate and an idiosyncratic component, but in contrast to the previous...

This paper investigates whether technological shocks, constructed to be consistent with the observed cross-country income dispersion, are also capable of accounting for development regularities related to capital accumulation. This question is approached via a quantitative theoretical analysis...

Although equilibrium allocations in models with incomplete markets are generally not Pareto-efficient, it is often argued that quantitative welfare losses from missing assets are small when time horizons are long and shocks are transitory. In this paper, we use a computational analysis to show...

This paper augments the neoclassical growth model to study the macroeconomic effects of uninsured idiosyncratic investment, or capital-income, risk. Under standard assumptions for preferences and technologies, individual policy rules are linear in individual wealth, ensuring that the equilibrium...