This paper studies Pareto-optimal risk-sharing arrangements in a private information economy with aggregate uncertainty and ex ante heterogeneous agents. I show how to implement Pareto optima as equilibria when agents can trade claims to consumption contingent on aggregate shocks in financial markets. The first result is that if aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks are independent, the implementa...

We examine changes in material well-being among individuals 65 and over during the last five decades, focusing on poverty and low percentiles of income and consumption, housing quality, and durable ownership. Our analyses make many methodological improvements in the measurement of income and consumption for those with few resources. We answer three related research questions. First, how has pov...

We study the deterministic control problem of maximizing utility from consumption of an agent who seeks to optimally allocate his wealth between consumption and investment in a nancial asset subject to taxes on bene ts with rst-inrst-out priority rule on sales. Short sales are prohibitted and consumption is restricted to be nonnegative. Such a problem has been introduced in a previous paper by ...