There is an extensive literature claiming that it is often difficult to make use of arbitrage opportunities in financial markets. This paper provides a new reason why existing arbitrage opportunities might not be seized. We consider a world with short-lived securities, no short-selling...

When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, which provides a scope for pareto improving interventions. Price regulation can be such a pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are taken into account. An appealing aspect of...

We examine the effects of collateralized borrowing in a realistically parameterized life-cycle portfolio choice problem. We provide basic intuition in a two-period model and then solve a multi-period model computationally. Our analysis provides insights into life-cycle portfolio choice relevant...

We analyze consumption and portfolio behavior in a life-cycle model with realistic borrowing costs and income processes. We show that even a small wedge between borrowing costs and the risk-free return dramatically shrinks the demand for equity. When the cost of borrowing equals or exceeds the...

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with stochastic production and incomplete markets to assess whether the introduction of an unfunded social security system leads to a Pareto improvement. When returns to capital and wages are imperfectly correlated a system that endows retired...

In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with many calibrations of the...

Trading volume of infinitely lived securities, such as equity, is generically zero in Lucas asset pricing models with heterogeneous agents. More generally, the end-of-period portfolio of all securities is constant over time and states in the generic economy. General equilibrium restrictions rule...

The general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets provides a unified framework for many problems in finance and macroeconomics. In its simplest version with only two time periods and a single physical commodity the model is ideally suited for the study of problems in cross sectional...

In general equilibrium models of financial markets, the capital asset pricing formula does not hold when agents have von Neumann-Morgenstern utility with constant relative risk aversion. In this paper we examine under which conditions on endowments and dividends the pricing formula provides a...

The general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets provides a unified framework for many problems in finance and macroeconomics. In its simplest version with only two time periods and a single physical commodity the model is ideally suited for the study of problems in cross sectional...