It is widely acknowledged that fire sales were a critical factor in inducing and exacerbating the financial crises of 2007--2008. The leverage of financial intermediaries, which is defined as the ratio of total assets to capital, is a key factor in causing fire sales. Why do financial...

The standard generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation of Euler equations in heterogeneous-agent consumption-based asset pricing models is inconsistent under fat tails because the GMM criterion is asymptotically random. To illustrate this, we generate asset returns and consumption data from...

We show that in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneity in risk aversion or belief, shifting wealth from an agent who holds comparatively fewer stocks to one who holds more reduces the equity premium. Since empirically the rich hold more stocks than do the poor, the top income share...

When central banks announce cuts to future interest rates, the expected costs of government debt service decrease, generating additional resources in future budgets. This paper demonstrates that if the rational-expectations assumption is dropped, fiscal authority can exploit those gains by...

None of the known macroeconomic theories are adequate to understand what to do in a global crisis like the 2020 Global Pandemic. Rational Expectations and monetarism cannot even ex-plain how is that a global crisis like this happens. The IS-LM model was designed to manage business cycles, but...

How costly are the imperfections of conditional welfare programs? Should we replace these programs with a Universal Basic Income (UBI)? We answer these questions using a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets, accounting for three overlooked imperfections of real-life conditional...

Poverty is an irrevocable curse of our existing institutional structure and a grey area of existing economic theories. The micro-credit can support a mere semi-subsistence economic structure since its targets are those poor people who are dependent on borrowings for their subsistence. The...

This paper presents a model on the leverage of financial intermediaries, where debt are held by risk averse agents and equity by the risk neutral. The paper shows that in an unregulated competitive market, financial intermediaries choose to be leveraged over the social best level. This is...