We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and study the problem of determining the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of the debt level. We show both analytically and numerically that...

When individuals' labor and capital income are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks, should capital and labor be taxed, and if so, how? In a two-period general equilibrium model with production, we derive a decomposition formula of the welfare effects of these taxes into insurance and...

We study a general equilibrium model in which firms choose their capital structure optimally, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. The costs of default are endogenous: bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their assets, resulting in a fire sale if there is...

For a general class of pure exchange OLG economies under uncertainty, we provide a complete characterization of the efficency properties of competitive equilibria when markets are only sequentially complete and the criterion of efficency is conditional Pareto optimality. We also consider a...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of uninformed buyers and a finite number of sellers, some of them informed. When there is only one seller, full information revelation never...

We investigate the trade-off between the risk-sharing gains enjoyed by more interconnected firms and the costs resulting from an increased risk exposure. We find that when the shock distribution displays "fat" tails, extreme segmentation into small components is optimal, while minimal...

The analysis will be carried out in a relatively simple set-up, where the various effects of social security, on the prices of long-lived assets and the stock of capital, and hence on output, wages and risky rates of returns, can be clearly identified.

In many countries, lenders are not permitted to use information about past defaults after a specified period of time has elapsed. The authors model this provision and determine conditions under which it is optimal. ; They develop a model in which entrepreneurs must repeatedly seek external funds...

At a competitive equilibrium of an incomplete-markets economy agents’ marginal valuations for the tradable assets are equalized ex-ante. We characterize the finest partition of the state space conditional on which this equality holds for any economy. This leads naturally to a necessary and...