This paper presents an analysis of the structure of competitive equilibrium in a smooth, exchange economy where there are incomplete markets in financial instruments whose overall payoffs (both prices and yields) are fixed in units of account. The main result establishes that such market...

Recent work on general equilibrium models with incomplete financial markets has demonstrated that when assets pay off in units of account, equilibrium prices and allocations are indeterminate. The equilibria in such models are also generically constrained suboptimal. A central planner can...

This paper examines how, in the presence of individual risk, economic efficiency can be achieved without an unrealistically large number of contingent markets. The authors show that consistency of beliefs and optimality of allocation can be guaranteed with an appropriate array of Arrow...