I develop an equilibrium model with collateral constraints in which rational agents are uncertain and learn about the equilibrium mapping between fundamentals and collateral prices. Bayesian updating of beliefs by agents can endogenously generate booms and busts in collateral prices and largely...

We conduct an extensive examination of the profitability of technical analysis in ten emerging foreign exchange markets. Studying 25,988 trading strategies for emerging foreign exchange markets, we find that the best rules can sometimes generate an annual mean excess return of more than 30%....

Recent risk sharing tests strongly reject the hypothesis of complete markets, because in the data: (1) the individual consumption comoves with income and (2) the consumption dispersion increases over the life cycle. In this paper, I revisit the implications of these risk sharing tests in the...

Various papers have identified shocks to investment as major drivers of output, investment, hours, and interest rates. These investment shocks have been linked to financial frictions because financial markets are instrumental in transforming consumption goods into installed capital. However, the...

Job creation and job destruction are investigated in an economy featured by search frictions in both labour and goods markets. We show that both the unemployment rate and the endogenous job destruction rate increase when the inflation rate rises, because the demand declines due to the increase...

Using the framework of Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg (forthcoming), we present a model of spatial takeoff that is calibrated using spatially-disaggregated occupational data for England in c.1710. The model predicts changes in the spatial distribution of agricultural and manufacturing employment...

Although standard incomplete market models can account for the magnitude of the rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle, they generate unrealistically concave age profiles of consumption inequality and unrealistically less wealth inequality. In this paper, I investigate the role of...

We study the impact of anticipated fiscal policy changes in a Ramsey economy where agents form long-horizon expectations using adaptive learning. We ex- tend the existing framework by introducing distortionary taxes as well as elastic labour supply, which makes agents' decisions...

In an asset-pricing model, risk-averse agents need to forecast the conditional variance of a stock's return. A near-rational restricted perceptions equilibrium exists in which agents believe prices follow a random walk with a conditional variance that is self-fulfilling. When agents estimate...

Using the standard real business cycle model with lump-sum taxes, we analyze the impact of fiscal policy when agents form expectations using adaptive learning rather than rational expectations (RE). The output multipliers for government purchases are significantly higher under learning, and fall...