Market Participation and Sunspot Equilibria

We investigate the structure of competitive equilibria in an exchange economy parametrized by (i) endowments and (ii) restrictions on market participation. For arbitrary regular endowments, if few consumers are restricted, there are no sunspot equilibria. If endowments are allowed to vary, while restrictions on market participation are fixed, there is a generic set of preferences such that sunspot equilibria exist for a non-empty subset of endowments. Our analysis extends to the general case of an arbitrary number of restricted consumers the results of Cass and Shell for the polar cases in which either (i) no consumers are restricted or (ii) all consumers are restricte

Market Participation and Sunspot Equilibria.

The authors investigate the structure of competitive equilibria in an exchange economy parametrized by endowments and restrictions on market participation. For arbitrary regular endowments, if few consumers are restricted, there are no sunspot equilibria. If endowments are allowed to vary, while restrictions on market participation are fixed, there is a generic set of preferences such that sunspot equilibria exist for a nonempty subset of endowments. The authors' analysis extends to the general case of an arbitrary number of restricted consumers the results of D. Cass and K. Shell (1983) for the polar cases in which either no consumers are restricted or all consumers are restricted. Copyright 1995 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

The Economic Effects of Restrictions on Government Budget Deficits

In overlapping-generations economies with perfect financial markets and lump-sum taxation, restrictions on the government budget deficit do not limit the set of achievable allocations. For economies in which the tax instruments are distortionary and limited in number, this strong form of irrelevance does not hold even if markets are perfect. We propose a weaker (but natural) definition of irrelevance in which only a finite (but arbitrarily large) number of restrictions near the baseline deficit are considered. We show that if the government can use only anonymous consumption taxes, there is weak irrelevance of the deficit restrictions if the number of tax instruments is large relative to the number of policy goals. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51, D91, E32. © 2000 Academic Press

Manipulation of endowments and sunspot equilibria

Sunspot equilibrium, Manipulation via endowments, Coalition formation, Equilibrium manifold, D50, D51, D52, D80,