In recent years a number of market participants called into question the efficiency of the price discovery mechanism in commodity futures markets. They believe that speculators move commodity futures markets away from their fundamentals by distorting prices and exacerbating volatility. The...

The global financial crisis (GFC) has drawn attention to the increased risk taking of financial institutions, in particular risk taking by banks. Some observers have also suggested that credit default swaps (CDS) have not only contributed to the GFC but to some extent have also exacerbated it....

In this paper we claim that modeling financial markets based on probability theory is a severe systematic mistake that led to the global financial crisis. We argue that the crisis was not just the result of risk managers using outdated financial data; we think that the employed efficiency...

The second welfare theorem and the core-equivalence theorem have been proved to be fundamental tools for obtaining equilibrium existence theorems, especially in an infinite dimensional setting. For well-behaved exchange economies that we call proper economies, this paper gives (minimal)...

We prove existence of a competitive equilibrium in a version of a Ramsey (one sector) model in which agents are heterogeneous and gross investment is constrained to be non negative. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into...

We study a class of finite strategic games with the property that every deviation of a coalition of players that is profitable to each of its members strictly decreases the lexicographical order of a certain function defined on the set of strategy profiles. We call this property the...

The problem of allocating indivisible objects to different agents, where each individual is assigned at most one object, has been widely studied. Pápai (2000) shows that the set of strategy-proof, nonbossy, Pareto optimal and reallocation-proof rules are hierarchical exchange rules |...

A key, and often controversial, issue in environmental negotiations is the appropriate extent of harmonization of environmental policies. This paper, within a general equilibrium model of international trade with endogenous pollution discharges, identifies instances in which pollution-tax...