This paper views uncertainty and economic fluctuations as being primarily endogenous and internally propagated phenomena. The most important Endogenous Uncertainty examined in this paper is price uncertainty which arises when agents do not have structural knowledge and are compelled to make...

This paper views uncertainty and economic fluctuations as being primarily endogenous and internally propagated phenomena. The most important Endogenous Uncertainty examined in this paper is price uncertainty which arises when agents do not have structural knowledge and are compelled to make...

We analyze the equilibrium in a two-tree (sector) economy with two regimes. The output of each tree is driven by a jump-diffusion process, and a downward jump in one sector of the economy can (but need not) trigger a shift to a regime where the likelihood of future jumps is generally higher....

Popular press and some practitioners have warned against threats that buying risky assets pose on agents saving for retirement, children education and other uses. This paper shows that in a standard two-period general equilibrium model where some savers have no risk-sharing motives, there exists...

I examine if the positive correlation between wealth and survivorship has any implications for the progressivity of Social Security's current benefit-earnings rule. Using a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model calibrated to the U.S. economy, I show that the optimal benefit-earnings link for...

Under risk, Arrow-Debreu equilibria can be implemented as Radner equilibria by continuous trading of few long-lived securities. We show that this result generically fails if there is Knightian uncertainty in the volatility. Implementation is only possible if all discounted net trades of the...

There has been a considerable debate whether disaster models like Barro (2006) can rationalize the equity premium puzzle. This is because empirically disasters are not single extreme events, but tend to be long-lasting periods in which moderate negative consumption growth realizations cluster....