It is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory...

We present a consistent pure-exchange general equilibrium model where agents may not be able to foresee all possible future contingencies. In this context, even with nominal assets and complete asset markets, an equilibrium may not exist without appropriate assumptions. Specific examples are...

Inspite of wide and long-standing support among economists for indexation of loan contracts there has been relatively little use of indexation, except in situations of extremely high inflation. The object of this paper is to provide a (theoretical) explanation for this puzzling phenomenon based...

We axiomatize in the Anscombe-Aumann setting a wide class of preferences called rank-dependent additive preferences that includes most known models of decision under uncertainty as well as state dependent versions of these models. We prove that aggregation is possible and necessarily linear if...

In an exchange economy with no aggregate uncertainty, and Bayesian agents, Pareto optimal allocations provide full insurance if and only if the agents have a common prior. It is hard to explain why there is relatively so little betting taking place. One is led to ask, when are full insurance...

We consider a stylized bond-equity economy, which though incomplete per se, has a rich enough set of assets available for trade such that given standard assumptions about behavior under uncertainty, the equilibrium allocation would arbitrarily approximate a complete market allocation. We show,...