Limited commitment to contracts can explain imperfect risk sharing even when individuals have access to complete insurance markets. Past contributions have focused on the resulting cross-sectional distribution of consumption (Cordoba 2008, Krueger and Perri 2006). In contrast, this paper looks...

This paper shows how two standard models of consumption risk-sharing?self-insurance through borrowing and saving and limited commitment to insurance contracts?replicate similarly well the standard, second-moment measures of insurance observed in US micro data. A nonparametric analysis, however,...

This paper presents a simple model to analyse how moral hazard resulting from information asymmetries in financial markets affects growth in financially open developing countries. We find that if domestic entrepreneurs can gamble with foreign creditors’ money, borrowing under standard debt...

Wealthier people generally hold a larger part of their savings in risky assets. Using the US Survey of Consumer Finances, I show that wealthier households also have a higher portfolio share of foreign assets. This relative home bias of the poor does not seem to be explained by fixed...

This paper looks at the effect of moral hazard, resulting from information asymmetries in financial markets, on growth in financially open developing countries. We show that if domestic entrepreneurs can gamble with foreign creditors' money, borrowing under standard debt contracts is constrained...

When the risk of default constrains financial contracts, public insurance policies can significantly affect private risk-sharing. This is because by changing income expectations and volatility, redistribution changes the attractiveness of default and thus endogenous borrowing constraints....

When default leads to exclusion from financial markets, the implied loss of consumption smoothing opportunities is more costly when income volatility is high. A rise in income risk thus makes default less attractive, allowing creditors to relax borrowing limits. I show how, in an open economy,...

This paper analyses the information content of monetary aggregates for inflation in Chile. In particular, we adopt the P* framework that separates the effect of an estimated money overhang from those of the output gap. We use two variants of the model, the original Hallman et al (1991), and...

This paper documents how poorer and less educated US households hold a smaller fraction of foreign assets in their financial portfolio. This average home bias of the poor is partly due to a lower probability of participating in foreign asset markets, often attributed to fixed costs of market...