During the 1990s, asset prices increased significantly in North America and Western Europe and in particular in the United States. This surge in asset prices coincided with the baby boom generation entering its peak earnings and savings years. We use an OLG model with production to ask whether...

In this paper, we show that within the set of stochastic three-period-lived OLG economies with productive assets (such as land), markets are necessarily sequentially incomplete, and agents in the model do not share risk optimally. We start by characterizing perfect risk sharing and find that it...

By solving an incomplete-markets model of multiperiod bond pricing {\it backwards}, we show that the mean and autocorrelation properties of the term premiums in the yield curve can be a reflection of the temporal distribution of uninsurable income shocks, {\it i.e.}, the term structure of...

We study deviations from the Law-of-One-Price using microeconomic data on the retail prices of approximately 220 individual goods and services across 122 cities located in 79 countries over the period from 1990 to 2000.

We use cross sectional data on local currency prices of over 1800 goods across 13 European countries to examine deviations from the law of one price. We find that an average (across goods for a particular country) of ratios of foreign to domestic prices provides a surprisingly accurate...

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...