The means-testing of age pension programs allows governments to control the receipt of pension benefits (extensive margin) and the benefit level (intensive margin). We investigate how the presence of the extensive margin influences the trade-off between protecting the poorer elderly and the...

This paper studies counterfeiting of bank notes in a monetary model under competitive search. The application of the refinement scheme proposed by Guerrieri et al. (2010) shows that there is no equilibrium with counterfeiting. However, due to the entry margin, counterfeiting poses a threat to...

This paper compares two classes of models that allow for additional channels of correlation between asset returns: regime switching models with jumps and models with contagious jumps. Both classes of models involve a hidden Markov chain that captures good and bad economic states. The distinctive...

The optimal investment policy for a standard multi-period mean–variance model is not time-consistent because the variance operator is not separable in the sense of the dynamic programming principle. With a nested conditional expectation mapping, we develop an investment model with time...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a novel setup that allows estimating separately the welfare costs of the uncertainty stemming from business-cycle fluctuations and from economic-growth variation, when the two types of shocks associated with them (respectively, transitory and...

We present a simple model for risky, corporate debt. Debtholders and equityholders have incomplete information about the financial state of the debt issuing company. Information is incomplete because it is delayed for all agents, and it is asymmetrically distributed between debtholders and...

In this paper, we study the structural change occurring in Japan's post-World War II era of rapid economic growth. We use a two-sector neoclassical growth model with government policies to analyze the evolution of the Japanese economy in this period and to assess the role of such policies. Our...

This paper characterizes the direct mechanism which implements the constrained optimal outcome in a version of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) with aggregate uncertainty and a continuum of agents. Using this result, numerical examples where the best direct mechanism has a bank-run-equilibrium are...

We characterize the location, stability and approach-time of optimal steady states in single-state, infinite-horizon, autonomous models by means of a simple function of the state variable, defined in terms of the model's primitives. The method does not require the solution of the underlying...

We propose a hypothesis testing procedure to investigate whether the same growth rate distribution is shared by all the firms in a balanced panel or, more generally, whether they share the same functional form for this distribution, without necessarily sharing the same parameters. We apply the...