The present Paper investigates the effects of incorporating illiquidity in a standard dynamic portfolio choice problem. Lack of liquidity means that an asset cannot be immediately traded at any point in time. We find the portfolio share of financial wealth invested in illiquid assets given the...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This Paper first documents the evolution of the cross-sectional income and consumption distribution in the US in the past 25 years. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we find that a rising income inequality has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality....

This Paper analyses dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed their income, the...

In this Paper we argue that standard tests of portfolio efficiency are biased because they neglect the existence of illiquid wealth. In the case of household portfolios, the most important illiquid asset is housing: if housing stock adjustments are costly and therefore infrequent, we show how...

The extent to which consumers are aware of available financial assets depends on the incentives of asset suppliers to spread information about the instruments they issue. We propose a theoretical framework in which the amount of information disseminated and the probability of individuals...

Recent empirical studies criticize the sluggish financial integration in the euro area and find that only interbank money markets are fully integrated so far. This paper studies the optimal regional and/or sectoral integration of financial systems given that integration is restricted to the...

This Paper posits that firms can choose the degree of risk inherent to their technological/ marketing/organizational strategies. Financial market development, by improving risk sharing between owners of listed firms, increases the willingness of these firms to take risky bets. This in turn...

We discuss the current state of stock ownership among households in major European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK), drawing parallels and contrasts with the US experience. We use detailed microeconomic datasets and explore the extent to which observed...

This Paper examines pitfalls of a state-dominated financial system in the context of China. These include possible segmentation of the internal capital market due to local government interference and misallocation of capital. First, we employ two standard tools from the international finance...