We consider an environment in which agents' skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes. We prove that it is typically Pareto optimal for an individual's marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so. This wedge is consistent with a...

This paper examines the properties of efficient sustainable allocations in an environment in which two agents want to share risk, have perfect information about each other, but cannot make commitments about future transfers. I describe as sustainable any allocation that can be supported as a...

This paper uses an example to show that a model that fits the available data perfectly may provide worse answers to policy questions than an alternative, imperfectly fitting model. The author argues that, in the context of Bayesian estimation, this result can be interpreted as being due to the...

In this paper, I consider the problem of optimal unemployment insurance in a world in which the unemployed agent's job-finding effort is unobservable and his level of savings is unobservable. I show that the first-order approach is not always valid for this problem, and I argue that the...

This paper provides a new rationalization for deposit insurance and systemic disintermediations. I consider an environment in which borrowers face no penalty for failing to repay obligations except the loss of their collateral. I assume that this collateral has aggregate risk. For a subset of...

Narayana Kocherlakota is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He works on optimal taxation, social insurance, and the micro-foundations of money.

This paper proves two theorems about economies with a finite number of infinitely lived agents who trade a complete set of one-period Arrow securities and several infinitely lived securities at each date, subject to short-sales constraints. The first theorem in the paper considers an equilibrium...

This paper investigates whether a bank regulator should terminate problem banks promptly or exercise forbearance. We construct a dynamic model economy in which entrepreneurs pledge collateral, borrow from banks, and invest in long-term projects. We assume that collateral value has aggregate risk...