A number of existing studies have concluded that risk sharing allocations supported by competitive, incomplete markets equilibria are quantitatively close to first-best. Equilibrium asset prices in these models have been difficult to distinguish from those associated with a complete markets...

An important aspect of the current U.S. social security system is the tradeoff between the risk sharing it provides and the distortions it imparts on private decisions. We focus on this tradeoff as it applies to labor market risk and capital accumulation. Specifically, we compare the current...

We study good-by-good deviations from the Law-of-One-Price for over 5,000 goods and services between European Union countries for the years 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1990. We find that between most countries there are roughly as many overpriced goods as there are underpriced goods. This feature is...

During the 1990s, asset prices increased significantly in North America and Western Europe and in particular in the United States. This surge in asset prices coincided with the baby boom generation entering its peak earnings and savings years. We use an OLG model with production to ask whether...

By solving an incomplete-markets model of multiperiod bond pricing {\it backwards}, we show that the mean and autocorrelation properties of the term premiums in the yield curve can be a reflection of the temporal distribution of uninsurable income shocks, {\it i.e.}, the term structure of...