Does heterogeneity matter for asset pricing and in particular for risk premiums? Starting with an irrelevance result, I classify the literature into two groups of papers taking different routes to link investor heterogeneity and risk premiums. The first group contains models of investors who...

Retirement benefit guarantees can ensure a minimum standard of living in retirement. I propose a framework to discuss the design of such guarantees. The model features a standard life-cycle setting, in which individual agents' choices can have negative external effects on public finances,...

The termination of a representative financial firm due to excessive leverage may lead to substantial bankruptcy costs. A government in the tradition of Ramsey (1927) may be inclined to provide transfers to the firm so as to prevent its liquidation and the associated deadweight costs. It is shown...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

We present a parsimonious and tractable general equilibrium model featuring acontinuum of overlapping generations, as in Blanchard (1985). In addition, we assumethat agents have standard utilities exhibiting constant relative risk aversion and canbe born with differing risk aversions and...