The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...

Standard theory of small open economies predicts a smooth path for consumption and investment over time, and procyclical current account balances and employment. This contrasts with the data for emerging countries, where consumption, investment and employment are highly procyclical and volatile,...

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) have become a standard tool used to determine the roles of monetary policy shocks in generating cyclical fluctuations in the United States. Using both long- and short-run identifying restrictions, various authors have explored the empirical response of...

This paper proposes the view that financial development and economic growth are linked through the characteristics of technology. The most obvious connection between technology and financial innovation emerges through risk-sharing. Technology is modeled as a distribution over outcomes....

We study the role an illiquid durable consumption good plays in determining the level of precautionary savings and the distribution of wealth in a standard Aiyagari model (i.e. a model with heterogeneous agents, idiosyncratic uncertainty, and borrowing constraints). Transactions costs induce an...

Efficient investment in human capital is a subject of great concern among economists. By means of an overlapping-generations macrodynamic model with credit constraints, imperfect insurance and exogenous labor supply, we appraise inefficiencies related to misinvestment in human capital and...

Efficient investment in human capital is a subject of great concern among economists. By means of an overlapping-generations macrodynamic model with credit constraints, imperfect insurance and exogenous labor supply, we appraise inefficiencies related to misinvestment in human capital and...

This paper shows that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals. First, worsening systemic conditions...

When asset markets are incomplete there are almost always many Pareto improving policy interventions. Remarkably, these interventions do not involve adding any new markets. Focusing on tax policy, I create a framework for proving the existence of Pareto improving taxes, for computing them, and...

One way to interpret the current policies of many central banks is that they seek to stabilize economic activity. One possible justification for such a policy is that there is volatility in macro variables that individual agents cannot insure against. We study the simplest possible extension of...