According to standard theory, wealth should have no intrinsic value. Yet, conventional wisdom, recent theories, and data suggest it might. We verify whether or not households have direct preferences over wealth in selecting assets. The fully structural econometric model focuses on a multivariate...

There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual postwar sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities - the peso problem -, can effect the equilibrium behavior of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To...