We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

We show that financial innovations that change the collateral capacity of assets in the economy can affect investment even in the absence of any shift in utilities, productivity, or asset payoffs. First we show that the ability to leverage an asset by selling non-contingent promises can generate...

We derive a set of equations which are a simple model for investor behavior in a theoretical financial market. The model incorporates the emotional aspect of investor sentiment with memory of price history which decays exponentially in time. Within this model, the emotional reaction of the body...

We study a two-agent equilibrium model with two goods where we interpret the agents as countries. We analyze the effect of an endogenous habit specification where each country benchmarks its consumption decision against the decision of the other country. We show that endogenous habits can...

The article presents a historical review of the literature related to the empirical problem of excessive risk premium. The risk premium (the difference between the return on equities and risk-free rate) observed in financial markets cannot be reconciled with theoretical models of financial...

The present paper considers a class of general equilibrium economics when the primitive uncertainty model features uncertainty about continuous-time volatility. This requires a set of mutually singular priors, which do not share the same null sets. For this setting we introduce an appropriate...

Coherent measures of risk defined by the axioms of monotonicity, subadditivity, positive homogeneity, and translation invariance are recent tools in risk management to assess the amount of risk agents are exposed to. If they also satisfy law invariance and comonotonic additivity, then we get a...

This paper introduces endogenous preference evolution into a Lucas-type economy and explores its consequences for investors' trading strategy and the dynamics of asset prices. In equilibrium, investors herd and hold the same portfolio of risky assets which is biased toward stocks of sectors that...

The term 'financialization' describes the phenomenon that commodity contracts are traded for purely financial reasons and not for motives rooted in the real economy. Recently, financialization has been made responsible for causing adverse welfare effects especially for low-income and low-wealth...

In a general equilibrium model with a continuum of traders and bounded aggregate endowment, I investigate the Market Selection Hypothesis that markets favor traders with accurate beliefs. Contrary to known results for economies with (only) finitely many traders, I find that risk attitudes affect...