We construct recursive solutions for, and study the properties of the dynamic equilibrium of an economy with three types of agents: (i) household/investors who supply labor with a finite elasticity, consume a large variety of goods that are not perfect substitutes and trade government bonds; (ii) firms that produce those varieties of goods, receive productivity shocks and set prices in a Calvo manner; (iii) a government that collects an income-driven fiscal surplus and acts mechanically, buying and selling bonds in accordance with a Taylor policy rule based on expected inflation. In this setting, we show that stock market returns are much less than one-for-one related to inflation over a 1-year holding period, which means that stock securities have a strong nominal character. We also show that their nominal character diminishes as the length of the stock-holding period increases, in accordance with empirical evidence.

Bernard Dumas, External Currency Market Equilibrium and its Implications for Regulation of the Eurocurrency Market: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 38, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings Forty-First Annual Meeting American Finance Association New York, N.Y. December 28-30, 1982 (May, 1983), pp. 468-470

Bernard Dumas, Session Topic: International Finance--Problems of Segmented Capital Markets: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 32, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 16-18, 1976 (May, 1977), pp. 512-515

A currency is not risky because devaluation is highly likely. If the devaluation were certain, there would be no risk at all. A weak currency can be less risky than a strong currency. A strong currency does not become risky because it has been used to denominate a firm's debt.

Derman and Kani (1994), Dupire (1994), and Rubinstein (1994) hypothesize that asset return volatility is a deterministic function of asset price and time, and develop a deterministic volatility function (DVF) option valuation model that has the potential of fitting the observed cross section of option prices exactly. Using S&P 500 options from June 1988 through December 1993, we examine the predictive and hedging performance of the DVF option valuation model and find it is no better than an ad hoc procedure that merely smooths Black–Scholes (1973) implied volatilities across exercise prices and times to expiration.

We incorporate trading fees into a dynamic, multiagent general‐equilibrium model in which traders optimally decide when to trade. For that purpose, we propose an innovative algorithm that synchronizes the traders. Securities prices are not so much affected by the payment of the fees itself, but rather by the trade‐off that the traders face between smoothing consumption and smoothing holdings. In calibrated examples, the interest rate and welfare decline with trading fees, while risk premia and volatilities increase. Liquidity risk and expected liquidity are priced, leading to deviations from the consumption‐CAPM. With trading fees, capital is slow‐moving, generating slow price reversal.

Because of non‐traded human capital, real‐world financial markets are massively incomplete, while the modeling of imperfect, dynamic financial markets remains a wide‐open and difficult field. Some 30 years after Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) taught us how to calculate the prices of derivative securities on an event tree by simple backward induction, we show how a similar formulation can be used in computing heterogeneous‐agents incomplete‐market equilibrium prices of primitive securities. Extant methods work forward and backward, requiring a guess of the way investors forecast the future. In our method, the future is part of the current solution of each backward time step.