The present project introduces the possibility of default on the trading contracts in an infinite horizon incomplete markets model, relaxing the usual assumption made in the literature with respect to the trading limits, which are chosen to be fixed or independent of the characteristics of the...

Using US quarterly post-war data, this paper documents the existence of two common trends among non-housing non durable and housing consumption, financial and real estate wealth, and labour income (a proxy for human wealth). The first equilibrium relationship reflects the stationarity of the...

The real business cycle (RBC) model pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982) was a fundamental step to understand business cycles. This literature, in general, claims that aggregate technology shocks are the main ingredient to explain these fluctuations. However, in order to match various...

We study the quantitative properties of a dynamic general equilibrium model in which agents face both idiosyncratic and aggregate income risk, state-dependent borrowing constraints that bind in some but not all periods and markets are incomplete. Optimal individual consumption -savings plans and...

This paper investigates the role of consumer heterogeneity in explaining asset returns. Using a Taylor series expansion of the individual's marginal utility of consumption around the conditional expectation of consumption, we derive an approximate equilibrium model for expected returns. In this...

A number of existing studies have concluded that risk sharing allocations supported by competitive, incomplete markets equilibria are quantitatively close to first-best. Equilibrium asset prices in these models have been difficult to distinguish from those associated with a complete markets...

In this paper, I propose and test a simple technology-based theory of firms' sensitivities to aggregate shocks. I show that when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is below unity, low profitability firms are more sensitive to aggregate shocks, i.e. to the business cycle....

Asset prices have recently become a common topic in economic debate. Nevertheless, much time has been spent in determining if they effectively exhibit a bubble component, and not in examining whether asset prices affectively contain relevant information concerning future market developments....

This paper analyzes empirically the volatility of consumption-based stochastic discount factors as a measure of implicit economic fears by studying its relationship with future economic and stock market cycles. Time-varying economic fears seem to be well captured by the volatility of stochastic...

Emerging market crises are characterized by large swings in both macroeconomic fundamentals and asset prices. The economic significance of observed movements in macroeconomic variables is obscured by the brief and extreme nature of crises. In this paper we propose to study the macroeconomic...