"Limits of Arbitrage" theories hypothesize that the marginal investor in a particular asset market is a specialized arbitrageur rather than a diversified representative investor. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this light. We show that the risk of homeowner prepayment,...

We examine the implications of arbitrage in a market with many assets. The absence of arbitrage opportunities implies that the linear functionals that give the mean and cost of a portfolio are continuous; hence there exist unique portfolios that represent these functionals. These portfolios span...

We propose a tractable model of an informationally inefficient market featuring non-revealing prices, no noise traders, and general assumptions on preferences and payoff distributions. We show the equivalence between our model and a substantially simpler model whereby investors face...

We study a model where some agents have private information about risky asset returns and trade to obtain capital gains, while others acquire the risky asset and hold it to maturity, forming expectations of returns based on market prices. We show that under such a structure, in addition to fully...

Existing literature continues to be unable to offer a convincing explanation for the volatility of the stochastic discount factor in real world data. Our work provides such an explanation. We do not rely on frictions, market in completeness or transactions costs of any kind. Instead, we modify a...

We offer a critique of the popular notion that the log-change of the real exchange rate equals the log-difference between the IMRSs of economically distinct agents in two economies. Contrary to existing claims, we show that this interpretation does not hold true in reduced-form SDF models that...

We model the opacity of over-the-counter (OTC) markets in a setup where agents share risks, but have incentives to default and their financial positions are not mutually observable. We show that this setup results in excess "leverage" in that parties take on short OTC positions that lead to...

There is a large and growing literature that studies the effects of weak enforcement institutions on economic performance. This literature has focused almost exclusively on primary markets, in which assets are issued and traded to improve the allocation of investment and consumption. The general...

We introduce a new theoretical framework to analyze imperfectly competitive financial markets and trade in assets in an international context. We present a two-country macroeconomic model in which agents are risk averse, assets are imperfect substitutes, the number of financial assets is...