This paper analyzes how insurance companies allow the issue of market incompleteness to be overcome. A general equilibrium economy is considered in which heterogeneous agents face endowment risks. Markets are incomplete: there are only markets for trading commodities ex-post and hedging price...

The classic Arrow-Debreu framework requires a very large number of specific securities to reach Pareto optimality. The present paper shows that financial intermediation can play an important role in maintaining a more parsimonious market framework while still obtaining Pareto optimality. In the...

In a dynamically efficienct economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of production economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and...

This paper reconsiders the theory of existence of efficient allocations and equilibria when consumption sets are unbounded below under the assumption that agents have incomplete preferences. Our model is motivated by an example in the theory of assets with short-selling where there is risk and...

The theory of existence of equilibrium with short-selling is reconsidered under risk and ambiguity modelled by risk averse variational preferences. No-arbitrage conditions are given in terms of risk adjusted priors. A sufficient condition for existence of efficient allocations is the overlapping...

The theory of existence of equilibrium with short-selling is reconsidered under risk and ambiguity modelled by risk averse variational preferences. A sufficient condition for existence of efficient allocations is that the relative interiors of the risk adjusted sets of expectations overlap. This...

We formalize the idea that the financial sector can be a source of non-fundamental risk. Households' desire to hedge against price volatility can generate price volatility in equilibrium, even absent fundamental risk. Fearing that asset prices may fall, risk-averse households demand safe assets...

In a partial equilibrium setting without price uncertainty, the balanced-budget substitution of an ad valorem tax on output for a specific (unit) tax can enhance welfare in imperfectly competitive markets and is without impact in a competitive world. This paper demonstrates that a substitution...