Financial innovation in recent decades has expanded portfolio choice. We investigate how greater choice affects investors' savings and asset returns. We establish a choice channel by which greater portfolio choice increases investors' savings—by enabling them to earn the aggregate risk premium...

We study a research and development race by extending the standard investment under uncertainty framework. Firms observe the stochastic evolution of their own potential payoffs from entry into a market, while conjecturing about the unobserved state of their opponents. They face a trade-off...

We study labor earnings dynamics in a developing economy with a large informal sector. We use nationally representative Brazilian panel data that cover both formal and informal workers. We document large disparities in earnings fluctuations faced by these segments of the labor market, as well as...

"While the traditional view of financial innovation emphasizes the risk sharing role of new financial assets, belief disagreements about these assets naturally lead to speculation, which represents a powerful economic force in the opposite direction. This paper investigates the effect of...

The net effect of financial innovation on portfolio risks depends on the quantitative strength of its effects on the uninsurable and the speculative variances. I consider a calibration of the model for new assets linked to national incomes of G7 countries, which were recommended by Athanasoulis...

In this paper we present a model of fire sales and market breakdowns, and of the financial amplification mechanism that follows from them. The distinctive feature of our model is the central role played by endogenous uncertainty. As conditions deteriorate, more “banks” within the financial...

We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness) while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries...