This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

In this paper we study the impact of the degree of concentration of a financial system on the aggregate demand for housing as well as the feedback effect of the size of the mortgage loan market on lenders' profits, internal capital accumulation, loan losses and potential bailouts. In a general...

The present paper examines impacts of foreign exchange rates against the Sudanese currency on savings. The increasing rates of foreign currencies in the domestic Sudanese Black markets have simultaneously resulted in the continuous depreciated Sudanese currency values over the past year...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of consumer credit conditions in an incomplete-market, general equilibrium model where households hold unsecured debt, and firms use labor. I show that consumer finance disturbances can cause business cycle fluctuations through a rich interplay...

In this paper, I study welfare aspects of inter vivos giving in general equilibrium by modeling joy of giving in an overlapping generations model. The welfare aspects are explained by the long-run results from numerical experiments with different gift tax rules in the model economy, which is...

Our study demonstrates how agents' expectations can interact dynamically with monetary and fiscal policy at the zero lower bound. We study expectation formation near the zero lower bound using a learning-to-forecast laboratory experiment under alternative policy regimes. In our experimental...

This paper shows that the precautionary motive, combined with asset incompleteness, is a major source of volatility and indeterminacy in financial markets. Price fluctuations originate from agents' efforts to insure themselves through time by borrowing and lending instead of shifting income...

Why do some COVID-19 mitigation strategies fail? As the pandemic continues to spread, policymakers are struggling to find effective policies that lead to fewer infections at a reasonable cost. Although the elusive nature of the virus makes predictions difficult, the field of law and economics...

We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...