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...

In competitive economies with private firm ownership, incomplete markets, and firm shareholders changing over time, several firm objectives have been proposed. Some are useful to understand efficiency of equilibria, and others are explicitly consistent with majority shareholder control or...

In economies with private firm ownership, when markets are incomplete, and firm shareholders change over time, there is no broad agreement on what ought to be a firm's objective. It is shown that ex-post, profit maximization is consistent with shareholder preferences in such economies; that is,...

In this paper, I study the existence and uniqueness of recursive equilibria in economies with aggregate and idiosyncratic risk. Rather than relying on compactness to establish existence, I exploit the monotonicity property of the equilibrium model and rely on arguments from convex analysis. This...

This study provides formal theoretical evidence that an agenda for economic development of a `Village' that is built around an aggressive foray into provision of Microfinance is more likely to fail, than to succeed. The Microfinance strategy fails, because any businesses formed by `Villagers'...

In this paper, I study the equilibrium implications when some investors in the economy overweight a subset of stocks within their portfolio. I find that the excess returns for the overweighted stocks are lower, all else being equal. This has strong testable implications for stock returns. In the...

This paper shows that the precautionary motive, combined with asset incompleteness, is a major source of volatility and indeterminacy in financial markets. Price fluctuations originate from agents' efforts to insure themselves through time by borrowing and lending instead of shifting income...

Under the assumption of normally distributed returns, we analyze whether the Cumulative Prospect Theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) is consistent with the Capital Asset Pricing Model. We find that in every financial market equilibrium, the Security Market Line Theorem holds. However, under...

Smart Contracts (SCs) are usually defined as contracts that are instantiated in computer-executable code that automatically executes all or parts of an agreement with the assistance of block-chain’s distributed trust technology. This is principally a technical description and results in an...

Can variances in institutional structures between markets and governments lead actors to engage in morally divergent behavior? We explore the behavior of early American whiskey distillers in both the market and political sphere. Whiskey distillers attempted to engage in dishonest behavior in the...