Inter-temporal discounting and uniform impatience

The uniform impatience hypothesis, a joint requirement on endowments and preferences, was imposed in the literature to prove equilibrium existence in infinite horizon sequential economies. In this note, we characterize this assumption in terms of asymptotic properties on inter-temporal discount factors.Uniform impatience, inter-temporal discounting. JEL Codes: D50, D52.

Welfare-improving debt constraints

We show that in economies without liquidity frictions, but with incomplete financial markets, when agents are infinitely lived and uniformly impatient, money can still be essential (that is, have a positive price in equilibrium) if and only if each agent has binding debt constraints at some node of her life span. That is, contrary to what might be expected, in the absence of a very productive financial market, frictions induced by debt constraints create some room for improving efficiency, by allowing money to have a role in transferring wealth across dates and states of nature.Cashless economies, Binding debt constraints, Fundamental value of money.

On the differentiability of the consumer demand function

For strictly quasi concave differentiable utility functions, demand isshown to be differentiable almost everywhere if marginal utilities arepointwise Lipschitzian. For concave utility functions, demand isdifferentiable almost everywhere in the case of differentiable additivelyseparable utility or in the case of quasi-linear utility.