The paper analyzes a very stylized model of crises and demonstrates how the degree of strategic complementarity in the actions of investors is a critical determinant of fragility. It is shown how the balance sheet composition of a financial intermediary, parameters of the information structure...

The price of a safe asset reflects not only the expected discounted future cash flows but also future service flows, since retrading allows partial insurance of idiosyncratic risk in an incomplete markets setting. This lowers the issuers’ interest burden and allows the government to run a...

This paper estimates a bivariate HEAVY system including daily and intra-daily volatility equations and its macro-augmented asymmetric power extension. It focuses on economic factors that exacerbate stock market volatility and represent major threats to financial stability. In particular, it...

When agents’ information is imperfect and dispersed, existing measures of macroeconomic uncertainty based on the forecast error variance have two distinct drivers: the variance of the economic shock and the variance of the information dispersion. The former driver increases uncertainty and...

Tax law is often uncertain. In particular, the use of tax shelters tends to be in the “grey area” between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. In this paper I show that uncertainty in tax law can help achieve higher efficiency than allowing or disallowing a tax shelter with...

This paper introduces a formal definition and an experimental measurement of the concept of cognitive uncertainty: people's subjective uncertainty about what the optimal action is. This concept allows us to bring together and partially explain a set of behavioral anomalies identified across four...

Labour income follows a deterministic growth trend and fluctuates between two values. Interest rates are drawn initially, fluctuate between two values and can differ in their arrival rates. Low interest rates imply a stationary long-run wealth distribution, high interest rates imply exploding...

A large literature suggests that the expected equity risk premium is countercyclical. Using a variety of different measures for this risk premium, we document that it also exhibits growth asymmetry, i.e. the risk premium rises sharply in recessions and declines much more gradually during the...

How does economic uncertainty affect the impact of tax policy? We exploit a natural experiment in which two very similar investment subsidies were implemented in the same country, two years apart: once during a period of economic stability, and once during a period of very high uncertainty....