In a general equilibrium model with a continuum of traders and bounded aggregate endowment, I investigate the Market Selection Hypothesis that markets favor traders with accurate beliefs. Contrary to known results for economies with (only) finitely many traders, I find that risk attitudes affect...

This paper analyzes the equilibrium pricing implications of contagion risk in a Lucastree economy with recursive preferences and jumps. We introduce a new economic channel allowing for the possibility that endowment shocks simultaneously trigger a regime shift to a bad economic state. We...

We analyze the implications of the structure of a network for asset prices in a general equilibrium model. Networks are represented via self- and mutually exciting jump processes, and the representative agent has Epstein-Zin preferences. Our approach provides a flexible and tractable unifying...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

We develop a model that reproduces the return and volatility spread between sin and non-sin stocks, where investors trade off dividends with the ethical assessment of companies. We relax the assumption of boycott behaviour and investigate the role played by the dividend share of sin stocks on...

There has been a considerable debate whether disaster models like Barro (2006) can rationalize the equity premium puzzle. This is because empirically disasters are not single extreme events, but tend to be long-lasting periods in which moderate negative consumption growth realizations cluster....

We develop a model that reproduces the average return and volatility spread between sin and non-sin stocks. Our investors do not necessarily boycott sin companies. Rather, they are open to invest in any company while trading off dividends against ethicalness. We show that when dividends and...

The Lucas (1978) Tree Model lies at the heart of modern macro-finance. At its core, it provides an analysis of the equilibrium price of a long-lived asset in an exchange economy where consumption is the objective, and the sole purpose of the asset is to smooth consumption through time....

We analyze the theoretical moments of a nonlinear approximation to real business cycle model with stochastic volatility and recursive preferences. We find that the conditional heteroskedasticity of stochastic volatility operationalizes a time-varying risk adjustment channel that induces...

This dissertation was written by Johannes Pfeiffer while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in November 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the department of economics of the University Regensburg in December 2016. The thesis studies unintended...