In this paper, we argue that endogenous shifts in private consumption behavior across sectors of the economy can act as a potent mitigation mechanism during an epidemic or when the economy is re-opened after a temporary lockdown. We introduce a SIR epidemiological model into a neoclassical...

The recent rise of digital currencies opens the door to their use in parallel alongside official currencies ("dollar'') for pricing and transactions. We construct a simple New Keynesian framework with parallel currencies as pricing units and sticky prices. Relative prices become a state...

In this paper we study the neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic income risk and aggregate risk in which risk sharing is endogenously constrained by one-sided limited commitment. Households can trade a full set of contingent claims that pay off depending on both idiosyncratic and...

This paper characterizes the stationary equilibrium of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households can insure against idiosyncratic income risk through long-term insurance contracts. Insurance companies operating in perfectly competitive...

This paper characterizes the transition dynamics of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households face idiosyncratic income risk and cannot commit to repay their debt. Therefore, even though a full set of contingent claims that pay out...

After remaining close to 1 US Dollar since its inception in November 2020, the algorithmic stablecoin UST crashed in the two weeks of May 9th to May 15th, 2022, leading to a price collapse of the underlying LUNA token and the erasure of more than 50 Billion U.S. Dollar or 90% in market value

I discuss private and central-bank-issued digital currencies, summarizing my prior research. I argue that prices of private digital currencies such as bitcoin follow random walks or, more generally, risk-adjusted martingales. For central bank digital currencies, I argue that they enhance the...

We use panel data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1991 to 2016 to document empirically what components of the household budget constraint change in response to shocks to household labor income, both over shorter and over longer horizons. We show that shocks to labor...

Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the long-term impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental...

We analyze efficient risk-sharing arrangements when coalitions may deviate. Coalitions form to insure against idiosyncratic income risk. Self-enforcing contracts for both the original coalition and any deviating coalition rely on a belief in future cooperation, and we treat the contracting...