This paper analyses alternative ‘regimes’ (i.e. profiles of opportunity sets for individuals) for an exchange economy, without assuming that individuals act on coherent preferences. A Strong Opportunity Criterion is proposed. This extends the requirements of McQuillin and Sugden’s (2012) Opportunity Criterion to every set of individuals in an economy. The concept of a ‘market-clearing single-pr...

I develop an analytical general-equilibrium model to explain economic sources of businesscycle pattern of aggregate stock market returns. With concave production functions and capital accumulation, a technology shock has a pro-cyclical direct effect and a counter-cyclical indirect effect on expected returns. The indirect effect, reflecting the “feedback” effect of consumers’ behavior on asset r...

This paper deals with the problem of incentive mechanism design in non-convex production economies when production sets and preferences both are unknown to the designer. We consider Nash-implementation of loss-free, average cost, marginal cost, voluntary trading, and quantity-taking pricing equilibrium allocations in economies involving increasing returns to scale or more general types of non-c...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. The processes are a¤ected by persistent random shocks stemming from agents’maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term –logit distribution–, one is able to calculate exactly the stationary distribution of the perturbed Markov process for ...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in decreasing returns in a monocentric city as population becomes very large. We construct a general-eq...

JEL classification E52 This paper examines the credibility of the Federal Reserve's monetary targets using survey data on money growth forecasts to measure market expectations. The paper provides two main results. First, there is strong evidence that the monetary targets were credible over the 1978 to 1993 sample period, although credibility fell in the post-1985 period. Second, both the federa...

This paper derives the optimal size and timing of interest rate target changes. Despite the simplicity of the optimal rule, we are able to replicate a number of puzzling features of interest rate targeting observed in practice, as well as explain some dynamic properties of market interest rates. Extensions to deal with monetary policy cycles, anticipated and unanticipated target changes, and th...

This paper examines the relation between money and housing variables in the euro area and in the US. Our empirical model is based on a standard money demand relation which is augmented by housing market variables. In doing so, co-integrated money demand relationships can be established for both the euro area and the US. Furthermore, we find evidence for asset inflation channels, that is, liquid...

I develop an asset-pricing model in which financial assets are valued for their liquidity– the extent to which they are useful in facilitating exchange–as well as for being claims to streams of consumption goods. The implications for average asset returns, the equitypremium puzzle, and the risk-free rate puzzle, are explored both analytically and quantitatively in a version of the model that ne...

We examine robustness of stability under learning to observability of exogenous shocks. Regardless of observability assumptions, the minimal state variable solution is robustly stable under learning provided the expectational feedback is not both positive and large, while the nonfundamental solution is never robustly stable. Overlapping generations and New Keynesian models are considered and co...