This paper examines a dynamic model of mutual insurance when households can also engage in self-insurance by storage. This mutual insurance is informal as it is assumed that there is no enforcement mechanism, so any mutual insurance arrangements must be self-enforcing. It is shown how...

The paper presents a closed economy model of endogenous growth driven by capital externalities arising from both private capital and public infrastructure. The model is calibrated to fit data for India, an approxmiately closed economy. Simulations suggest that fiscal policy certainly matters and...

We develop an endogenous growth model driven by externalities of both private capital and public infrastructure. The government levies distortionary taxation to finance a publicly provided consumption good and public infrastructure. Firms face adjustment costs. We first study the steady state,...

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The maximin criterion defines the highest utility level that can be sustained in an intergenerational equity perspective. The viability approach makes it possible to characterize all the economic trajectories sustaining a given, not necessarily maximal, utility level. In this paper, we exhibit...

Although rational consumers without bequest motives are better off investing exclusively with annuitized instruments in partial equilibrium, we demonstrate the welfare effect of annuitization is ambiguous in general equilibrium on account of pecuniary externalities. Absent institutional...

We propose a simple and powerful numerical algorithm to compute the transition process in continuous-time dynamic equilibrium models with rare events. In this paper we transform the dynamic system of stochastic differential equations into a system of functional differential equations of the...

In a recent paper [Luo, Smith, and Zou (2009)] we showed that the spirit of capitalism could in theory resolve the two fundamental anomalies of modern consumption theory, excess sensitivity and excess smoothness. However, that basic model could not plausibly explain the empirical magnitude of...

We consider infinite horizon economies populated by a continuum of agents who are subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This framework contains models of saving and capital accumulation with incomplete markets in the spirit of works by Bewley, Aiyagari, and Huggett, and models of entry, exit and...