This article develops a model which shows that bank deposit contracts can provide allocations superior to those of exchange markets, offering an explanation of how banks subject to runs can attract deposits. Investors face privately observed risks which lead to a demand for liquidity. Traditional demand deposit contracts which provide liquidity have multiple equilibria, one of which is a bank run. Bank runs in the model cause real economic damage, rather than simply reflecting other problems. Contracts which can prevent runs are studied, and the analysis shows that there are circumstances when government provision of deposit insurance can produce superior contracts. This article is reprinted from the Journal of Political Economy (June 1983, vol. 91, no. 3, pp. 401--19) with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. ...

Abstract: In the first half of this century, special attention was given to two features of the business cycle: the comovement of many individual economic series and the different behavior of the economy during expansions and contractions. Recent theoretical and empirical research has revived interest in each attribute separately, and we survey this work. Notable empirical contributions are dynamic factor models that have a single common macroeconomic factor and nonlinear regime-switching models of a macroeconomic aggregate. We conduct an empirical synthesis that incorporates both of these features. It is desirable to know the facts before attempting to explain them; hence, the attractiveness of organizing business-cycle regularities within a model-free framework. During the first half of this century, much research was devoted to obtaining just such an empirical characterization of the business cycle. The most prominent example of this work

Abslract. The article considers the possibility that asset prices might deviate from intrinsic values based on market fundamentals. Three broad categories of theory are surveyed: (a) growing bubbles (b) fads and (c) information bubbles. 'Sunspot' theories are also discussed. The paper covers both theory and evidence, and directions for future research are discussed.

Abstract not found

The Black-Scholes theory of option pricing has been considered for many years as an important but very approximate zeroth-order description of actual market behavior. We generalize the functional form of the diffusion of these systems and also consider multi-factor models including stochastic volatility. Daily Eurodollar futures prices and implied volatilities are fit to determine exponents of functional behavior of diffusions using methods of global optimization, Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA), to generate tight fits across moving time windows of Eurodollar contracts. These short-time fitted distributions are then developed into long-time distributions using a robust non-Monte Carlo path-integral algorithm, PATHINT, to generate prices and derivatives commonly used by option traders.

time and comments. Special thanks are due to Simon Gervais. I also wish to acknowledge the comments

Abstract not found

I examine a model with two sectors of production: consumption and investment. In the model, indeterminacy of equilibria results due to the presence of small sector-specific externalities in production. In fact, I find that indeterminacy results with a certain, minimum value of the externality in the investment sector, even with no externality in the consumption sector. I find that the indeterminacy properties of the model vary, depending on the form of the utility function. For example, with utility that is logarithmic in consumption, these properties are completely independent of the value of the externality in the consumption sector.

Consider the postage stamp. As title to a future good (or, in this case, service) with monetary value, this humble object is essentially the same as a security. Its value, 37 cents, can be identiÞed with the present value of the service (delivery of a letter) to which its owner is entitled.

We examine price formation in a simple static model with asymmetric information, an infinite number of risk neutral traders and no noise traders. Here we re-examine four results associated with rational expectations models relating to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium prices, the advantage of becoming informed, the costly acquisition of information, and the impossibility of having equilibrium prices with higher volatility than the underlying fundamentals.