This paper investigates whether assuming that households possess advance information on their income shocks helps to overcome the difficulty of standard models to understand consumption insurance in the US. As our main result, we find that the quantitative relevance of advance information...

We study the effects of a social security reform in a large overlapping generations model where markets are incomplete and households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We depart from the previous literature by assuming that, because of lack of commitment in the credit market, the...

This paper highlights the identification problem of the reduced-form approach in quantifying the degree of consumption insurance as in Blundell et al. (2008, BPP thereafter). I argue that the reduced-form estimates are difficult to interpret in terms of the degree of consumption insurance. I...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income...

The size distributions of many economic variables seem to obey the double power law, that is, the power law holds in both the upper and the lower tails. I explain this emergence of the double power law—which has important economic, econometric, and social implications—using a tractable...

This paper tests the hypothesis of complete markets in a panel of Italian households drawn from the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). Under the hypothesis that markets are complete and preferences are of the CRRA type, consumption growth is equated across...

We study competitive equilibrium in sequential economies under limited commitment. Default induces permanent exclusion from financial markets and endogenously determined solvency constraints prevent debt repudiation. Our analysis shows that such an enforcement mechanism is essentially fragile,...

To what extent is public debt private liquidity? Much policy advice given in the aftermath of the financial crisis rests on the assumption that increasing public debt relaxes borrowing constraints of private households. This is the case for ad-hoc debt limits, which are exogenous to public...

In this chapter we study dynamic incentive models in which risk sharing is endogenously limited by the presence of informational or enforcement frictions. We comprehensively overview one of the most important tools for the analysis such problems—the theory of recursive contracts. Recursive...