Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

We consider an infinite horizon exchange economy with incomplete markets and default. As in Geanakoplos and Zame (1998) financial securities are traded if the promises associated with them are backed by collateral. The only collateral available in our economy are shares of Lucas trees. We prove...

\documentstyle[portada,11pt]{article} This paper shows that the presence of private information in an economy can be a source of market incompleteness even when it is feasible to issue a set of securities that completely eliminates the informational asymmetries in equilibrium. We analyze a...

In this paper, we examine an exchange economy with a financial market composed of three assets: shares of a stock, European call options written on the stock, and riskless bonds. The financial market is assumed to be incomplete and the option is not a redundant asset. In such a case the...

This paper proposes a model of an incomplete markets economy with pro- duction, in which the firm acts as financial innovator by issuing claims against its stock. The firm’s objective is to maximize its adjusted value, which is the sum of the market value and the shareholders’ surplus from...

We consider a two period pure exchange economy with a finite number of states of nature at the second date. The economy consists of a real asset structure and a finite set of durable goods in the initial period that depreciate; we suppose that there is only one single good available in each state...

This paper provides an analysis of the asymptotic properties of consumption allocations in a stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous consumers. In particular we investigate the market selection hypothesis, that markets favor traders with more accurate beliefs. We show that in any...

The classic Lucas asset pricing model with complete markets stresses aggregate risk and, hence, fails to investigate the impact of agents heterogeneity on the dynamics of the equilibrium quantities and measures of trading volume. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...