When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, which provides scope for Pareto improving interventions. Price regulation can be such a Pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are taken into account. An appealing aspect of price...

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of...

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that cause prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. The argument can be extended to...

A feasible social state is irreducible if and only if, for any non-trivial partition of individuals into two groups, there exists another feasible social state at which every individual in the first group is equally well-off and someone strictly better-off. Competitive equilibria decentralize...

Incomplete asset markets cause competitive equilibria to be constrained suboptimal and provides scope for Pareto improving interventions. In this paper, we examine how intervention in prices in asset or spot commodity markets serve this purpose. We show that, if ?x-price equilibria behave...

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 are very weak monotonicity requirement, and the asset return matrix allows for redundant assets. Prices of...