Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

We employ laboratory methods to study stability of competitive equilibrium in Scarf's economy (International Economic Review, 1960). Tatonnement theory predicts that prices are globally unstable for this economy, i.e. unless prices start at the competitive equilibrium they oscillate without...

Monetary and fiscal policy do not determine the stochastic path of prices: in the absence of financial policy, there remains indeterminacy indexed by an arbitrary probability measure over the set of states of the world. With an interest rate policy, and only if the asset market is complete,...

Is general equilibrium theory empirically testable? Our perspective on this question differs from the standard, Sonnenschein-Debreu-Mantel (SDM) viewpoint. While SDM tradition considers aggregate (excess) demand as a function of prices, we assume that what is observable is the equilibrium price...

Economies with asymmetric information are encompassed by an extension of the model of general competitive equilibrium that does not require an explicit modeling of private information. Sellers have discretion over deliveries on contracts; this is in common with economies with default, incomplete...

Do Walrasian markets function orderly in the presence of adverse selection? In particular, is their outcome efficient? This paper addresses these questions in the context of a Rothschild and Stiglitz insurance economy. We identify an externality associated with the presence of adverse selection...

The present note shows that the concept of a distribution economy (Hildenbrand (1974)) is closely related to a framework of an exchange economy in which the agents’ individual characteristics (i.e. preferences and endowments) are random (Hildenbrand (1971), Bhattacharya and Majumdar (1973),...

We We integrate individual power in groups into general equilibrium models. The relationship between group formation, resource allocation, and the power of specific individuals or particular sociological groups is investigated. We introduce, via an illustrative example, three appealing concepts...