Pareto Improving Taxes

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of competitive allocations might provide a rationale for economic policy in economies with externalities. It shows that policy makers should look for good tax packages that help everybody, rather than thinking taxes must inevitably be bad for some lobby that will oppose them.Externalities, Commodity taxes, Constrained suboptimality

Rational dialogs

Eventual consensus is the only property of a rational dialog. Key words: dialog; rationality; agreement. JEL classification: D83

Pareto Improving Price Regulation When the Asset Market is Incomplete.

Incomplete asset markets cause competitive equilibria to be constrained suboptimal and provides scope for Pareto improving interventions. In this paper, we examine how intervention in prices in asset or spot commodity markets serve this purpose. We show that, if ?x-price equilibria behave sufficiently regularly near Walrasian equilibria, Pareto improving price regulation is generically possible. An advantage of price regulation, contrasted with interventions in individuals’ asset portfolios, is that it operates anonymously, on market variables.incomplete asset market; ?x-price equilibria; Pareto improvement

Monetary Equilibria over an Infinite Horizon.

Money provides liquidity services through a cash-in-advance constraint. The exchange of commodities and assets extends over an infinite horizon under uncertainty and a sequentially complete asset market. Monetary policy sets the path of rates of interest and accommodates the demand for balances. A public authority, inheriting a strictly positive public debt, raises revenue from taxes and seignorage. Competitive equilibria exist, under mild solvency conditions. But, for a fixed path of rates of interest, there is a nontrivial multiplicity of equilibrium paths of prices of commodities. Determinacy requires that, subject to no-arbitrage and in addition to rates of interest, the prices of state-contingent revenues be somehow determined.money; equilibrium; indeterminacy; monetary policy; fiscal policy

An argument for positive nominal interest

In a dynamic economy, money provides liquidity as a medium of exchange. A central bank that sets the nominal rate of interest and distributes its profit to shareholders as dividends is traded in the asset market. A nominal rates of interest that tend to zero, but do not vanish, eliminate equilibrium allocations that do not converge to a Pareto optimal allocation. Key words: nominal rate of interest; dynamic efficiency. JEL classification numbers: D-60; E-10

Short sales, destruction of resources, welfare

A reduction in the output of productive assets (trees) in some states of the world can expand the span of payoffs of assets; and, improved risk sharing may compensate for the loss of output and support a Pareto superior allocation. Surprisingly, if short sales of assets are not allowed, improved risk sharing that results from the destruction of output does not suffice to induce a Pareto superior allocation

Suboptimality with land

In a stochastic economy of overlapping generations subject to uninsurable risks, competitive allocations need not be constrained optimal. This is the case even in the presence of long-lived assets and no short sales

The identification of beliefs from asset demand

The demand for assets as prices and initial wealth vary identifies beliefs and attitudes towards risk. We derive conditions that guarantee identification with no knowledge either of the cardinal utility index or of the distribution of future endowments or payoffs of assets; the argument applies even if the asset market is incomplete and demand is observed only locally

The identification of attitudes towards ambiguity and risk from asset demand

Individuals behave differently when they know the objective probability of events and when they do not. The smooth ambiguity model accommodates both ambiguity (uncertainty) and risk. For an incomplete, competitive asset market, we develop a revealed preference test for asset demand to be consistent with the maximization of smooth ambiguity preferences; and we show that ambiguity preferences constructed from finite observations converge to underlying ambiguity preferences as observations become dense. Subsequently, we give sufficient conditions for the asset demand generated by smooth ambiguity preferences to identify the ambiguity and risk indices as well as the ambiguity probability measure. We do not require ambiguity beliefs to be observable: in a generalized specification, they may not even be defined. An ambiguity free asset plays an important role for identification