This paper studies the optimal determination of bankruptcy exemptions for risk averse borrowers who use unsecured contracts but have the possibility of defaulting. I show that, in a large class of economies, knowledge of four variables is sufficient to determine whether a bankruptcy exemption...

In this paper, I construct a model of an exchange economy in which bankruptcy arises in a manner similar to what we observe. This model is a more realistic representation of some markets in which intertemporal assets are traded. Using standard and natural assumptions, I show that every economy...

Episodes of high inflation are generally accompanied by a shortening of the maturity of nominal debt contracts. This paper develops a multiperiod general equilibrium model with incomplete markets to study the relationship between inflation and the maturity structure of nominal bonds. The model...

The Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy triggered the failure of the collateralized debt markets, which was a major contributor of the financial crisis in 2008. Such collateralized debt markets have both collateral price channel and counterparty (borrower and lender) channel of contagion. I propose a...

We document the cyclical properties of unsecured consumer credit (procyclical and volatile) and of consumer bankruptcies (countercyclical and very volatile). Using a growth model with household heterogeneity in earnings and assets with access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and...

Investment opportunities are plenty, but not all are profitable. This papers seeks to clarify the need to make a proper fundamental analysis when investing in various securities. Fundamental analysis does not require one to be a financial analyst so as to detect high risk assets or assets with a...

We study the dynamic Ramsey problem of finding optimal public debt and linear taxes on capital and labor income within a tractable infinite horizon model with incomplete markets. With zero public expenditure and debt, it is optimal to tax the risky labor income and subsidize capital, while a...

Monetary and fiscal policy do not determine the stochastic path of prices: in the absence of financial policy, there remains indeterminacy indexed by an arbitrary probability measure over the set of states of the world. With an interest rate policy, and only if the asset market is complete,...

This paper analyzes one-good exchange economies with two infinitely-lived agents and incomplete markets. It is shown that there are no recursive (Markov) equilibria for which borrowing (debt) constraints never bind if the state space of exogenous and endogenous variables is a compact subset of...