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...

In a three-period finite competitive exchange economy with incomplete financial markets and retrading, we study the possibility of controlling asset price volatility through financial innovation. We first give sufficient conditions on preferences and endowments implying that whatever is the...

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...

We show that sovereign debt is unsustainable if debt contracts are not supported by direct sanctions and default carries only a ban from ever borrowing in financial markets even in the presence of uninsurable risks and time-varying interest rate. This extension of Bulow and Rogoff, 1989 requires...

We show that debt is sustainable at a competitive equilibrium based solely on the reputation for repayment; that is, even without collateral or legal sanctions available to creditors. In an incomplete asset market, when the rate of interest falls recurrently below the rate of growth of 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...