We decompose the Backus-Smith [1993] statistic --- a low or negative correlation between relative consumption and the real exchange rate at odds with a high degree of international risk sharing --- in its dynamic components at different frequencies. Using multivariate spectral analysis...

Despite much work on hedging in incomplete markets, the literature still lacks tractable dynamic hedges in plausible environments. In this article, we provide a simple solution to this problem in a general incomplete-market economy in which a hedger, guided by the traditional minimum-variance...

Accounting for the pervasive evidence of limited international risk sharing is an important hurdle for open-economy models, especially when these are adopted in the analysis of policy trade-offs likely to be affected by imperfections in financial markets. Key to the literature is the evidence,...

We characterize policies for the supply of liquidity in an economy where agents have a precautionary savings motive due to random production opportunities and the presence of borrowing constraints. We show that a socially efficient provision of liquidity involves a trade-off between insurance...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment obligations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which the government optimally fi…nances itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally...

Financial markets are incomplete, thus for many households borrowing is possible only by accepting a financial contract that specifies a fixed repayment. However, the future income that will repay this debt is uncertain, so risk can be inefficiently distributed. This paper argues that a monetary...

In this paper we study the transmission of income shocks into nondurable consumption in the presence of durable goods. We use a standard a life-cycle model with two goods to characterize the interaction of durability of goods, durability of shocks, and borrowing constraints as determinants of...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...

Alternative assets, such as private equity, hedge funds, and real assets, are illiquid and opaque, and thus pose a challenge to traditional models of asset allocation. In this paper, we study asset allocation and asset pricing in a general-equilibrium model with liquid assets and an alternative...

Between 2007 and 2009, government expenditures increased rapidly across the OECD countries. While economic research on the impact of government purchases has flourished, in the data, about three quarters of the increase in expenditures in the United States (and more in other countries) was in...