When the asset market is incomplete, there typically exist taxes on trades in assets and a redistribution of revenue in the asset market that are Pareto improving. The policy is anonymous, it economizes on complexity, and it results in ex post Pareto optimal allocations; it is publicly announced...

In this paper we use global analysis to study the welfare properties of general equilibrium economies with incomplete markets (GEI). Our main result is to show that constrained Pareto optimal equilibria are contained in a linear submanifold of the equilibrium set. This result is explicitly...

It is known that the incompleteness of asset markets causes inefficiency in almost every equilibrium. Yet unexplored is the ”size” of this inefficiency. The size of a Pareto improvement is the total willingness to pay for it, out of current consumption. Inefficiency is the maximum size of...

A classic characterization of competitive equilibria views them as feasible allocations maximizing a weighted sum of utilities. It has been applied to establish fundamental properties of the equilibrium notion, such as existence, determinacy, and computability. However, it fails for economies...

Equilibrium paths in economies of overlapping generations depend on the frequency of trade. In a logarithmic example, determinacy obtains as the frequency of trades tends to infinity or trade occurs in continuous time. If time extends infinitely into the infinite past as well as into the...

In a game with rational expectations, individuals simultaneously refine their information with the information revealed by the strategies of other individuals. At a Nash equilibrium of a game with rational expectations, the information of individuals is essentially symmetric: the same profile of...

When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, and there is scope for Pareto improving interventions. Price regulation, which operates anonymously, on market variables, can be such a Pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are...

At arbitrary prices of commodities and assets, fix-price equilibria exist under weak assumptions: endowments need not satisfy an interiority condition, utility functions need only satisfy a very weak monotonicity requirement, and the asset return matrix allows for redundant assets. Prices of...

Monetary and fiscal policy do not determine the stochastic path of prices: in the absence of financial policy, there remains indeterminacy indexed by an arbitrary probability measure over the set of states of the world. With an interest rate policy, and only if the asset market is complete,...

We consider a cash-in-advance economy under uncertainty in which monetary policy sets either short-term nominal interest rates or money supplies. We show that both the initial price level and the distribution of the inflation rate up to its expectation are indeterminate, regardless of the degree...