We study two-period pure-exchange Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) economies with incomplete financial markets and restricted participation. We characterize the optimal financial-market structure and the efficient innovations consisting of both the introduction of new assets and the...

This paper proposes that the introduction of non-redundant assets can endogenously modify trader participation in financial markets, which can lead to a lower market premium and a higher interest rate. We demonstrate this mechanism in a tractable exchange economy with endogenous participation....

We measure the amount of income insurance and cross-sectional consumption smoothing (lending and borrowing) achieved within subgroups of states, such as regions or clubs, e.g. the club of rich states. We find that there is as much income insurance between, as well as within, regions. By...

We provide a theory of pricing for emerging asset classes, like emerging markets, that are not yet mature enough to be attractive to the general public. Our model provides an explanation for the volatile access of emerging economies to international financial markets and for several stylized...

This paper examines the effects of financial market imperfections in the context of financial integration. We employ a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs and address the question of cross-border capital flows from poor to rich as well as focus on aggregate capital...

In the post-crisis period, increased regulation of financial intermediaries led to a significant decline in corporate bond market liquidity. In order to stabilize these markets, policy makers recently proposed that the trading of corporate bonds should be more centralized. In this paper, we show...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of central bank purchases of government bonds by investigating the following three questions: Under what conditions are these purchases socially desirable, what incentive problems do they mitigate, and how large are these...

While it is common knowledge that portfolio separation in a continuous-time lognormal market is due to the basic properties of the Gaussian distribution, the usual textbook exposition relies on dynamic programming and thus Itô stochastic calculus and the appropriate regularity conditions. This...

This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgeable, multiple risky assets, multiple risky assets, many...

We consider an exchange economy with heterogeneous agents and multiple assets and investigate the coupled dynamics of assets' prices and agents' wealth. We assume that agents have heterogeneous beliefs and invest on each asset a fraction of wealth proportional to its expected dividends. Our main...