We explore the accumulation of assets in the presence of limited insurance against idiosyncratic shocks, borrowing constraints and endogenous labor productivity due to the so-called "nutrition curve". We show that in such an environment, any stationary equilibrium is characterized by a polarized...

In this paper we study the quantitative properties of alternative social security regimes in a large overlapping generations model where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We study this issue in two model economies. The first is the standard one characterized by exogenous...

Entrepreneurs often face undiversifiable idiosyncratic risks from their business investments. Motivated by this observation, we extend the standard real options approach to investment to an incomplete markets environment and analyze the joint decisions of business investments, consumption-saving...

When financial markets are incomplete, shareholders will in general disagree on the optimal level of investment to be undertaken by the firm (Grossman and Hart, 1979). Macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets (e.g. Krusell and Smith, 1998) usually ignore this issue...

Empirical evidence indicates local jurisdictions are internally more heterogenous than standard sorting models predict. We develop a dynamic multi-region model, with fluctuating regional house prices, where an owner-occupying household's location choice depends on its current wealth and its...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer", trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid sharp adjustments in their payments to private agents despite sharp fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, their ability to sustain debt is inversely...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer" struggling to smooth government outlays given the randomness of public revenues in a world with "liability dollarization" in which they can only issue debt denominated in hard currencies, or indexed to tradable goods prices....

Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We...

The neoclassical growth model is augmented to study the macroeconomic effects of uninsured idiosyncratic investment risk. As compared to complete markets, the steady state is characterized by both a lower interest rate and a lower capital stock when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution...