Incomplete financial markets with real assets and wealth-dependent credit limits

Matthew Hoelle, Marina Pireddu () and Antonio Villanacci ()

Journal of Economics, 2016, vol. 117, issue 1, 36 pages

Abstract: In this paper we analyze the effects of restricted participation in a two-period general equilibrium model with incomplete financial markets and two key elements: the competitive trading of real assets, i.e., assets having payouts in terms of vectors of commodities, and household-specific inequality constraints that restrict participation in the financial markets. Similar to certain arrangements in the market for bank loans, household borrowing is restricted by a household-specific wealth dependent upper bound on credit lines in all states of uncertainty in the second period. We first establish that, generically in the set of the economies, equilibria exist and are finite and regular. We then show that equilibria are generically suboptimal. Finally, we provide a robust example demonstrating that the equilibrium allocations can be Pareto improved through a tightening of the participation constraints. This suggests, contrary to what is often cited as economic wisdom in the popular press, that in a setting with frictions resulting in an inefficient allocation the regulation of markets may have a Pareto-improving effect on the economy. Copyright Springer-Verlag Wien 2016

Keywords: General equilibrium; Restricted participation; Financial markets; Generic regularity; Real assets; Pareto suboptimality; D50; D53; D61; G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00712-015-0438-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jeczfn:v:117:y:2016:i:1:p:1-36

DOI: 10.1007/s00712-015-0438-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics is currently edited by Giacomo Corneo

More articles in Journal of Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().